Gender and Well-Being in Europe

GENDER AND WELL-BEINg IN EUROPE Gender and Well-Being Series Editors: Cristina Borderias, Professor of Contemporary H...

Author: Bernard Harris | Lina Galvez and Helena Machado

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GENDER AND WELL-BEINg IN EUROPE

Gender and Well-Being Series Editors: Cristina Borderias, Professor of Contemporary History, University of Barcelona, Spain and Bernard Harris, Professor of the History of Social Policy, University of Southampton, UK The aim of this series is to enhance our understanding of the relationship between gender and well-being by addressing the following questions: • • • • •

How can we compare levels of well-being between women and men? Is it possible to develop new indicators which reflect a fuller understanding of the nature of well-being in the twenty-first century? How have women and men contributed to the improvement of individual well-being at different times and in different places? What role should institutions play in promoting and maintaining well-being? In what ways have different social movements contributed to the improvement of well-being over the last 300 years?

The volumes in this series are designed to provide rigorous social-scientific answers to these questions. The series emerges from a series of symposia, organized as part of COST Action 34 on ‘Gender and Well-being: Work, Family and Public Policies’. Participants were drawn from disciplines including economics, demography, history, sociology, social policy and anthropology and they represent more than 20 European countries.

Gender and Well-Being in Europe Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Edited by BERNARD HARRIs University of Southampton, UK LINA GÁLVEZ University of Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain HELENA MAchADO University of Minho, Portugal

© Bernard Harris, Lina Gálvez and Helena Machado 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Bernard Harris, Lina Gálvez and Helena Machado have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Gender and well-being in Europe : historical and contemporary perspectives. -- (Gender and well-being) 1. Well-Being--Sex differences--Europe--History-Congresses. 2. Europe--Social conditions--Congresses. I. Series II. Harris, Bernard, 1961- III. Galvez, Lina. IV. Machado, Helena. 305.3'094-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gender and well-being in Europe : historical and contemporary perspectives / by Bernard Harris, Lina Galvez and Helena Machado. p. cm. -- (Gender and well-being) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-7264-7 -- ISBN 978-0-7546-8863-1 (ebook) 1. Well-Being--Europe. 2. Sex discrimination against women--Europe. 3. Quality of life--Europe. I. Harris, Bernard, 1961- II. Galvez, Lina. III. Machado, Helena. HN374.G46 2009 305.42094--dc22 ISBN 978 0 7546 7264 7 (hbk) eISBN

2009004055

Contents List of Figures List of Tables Notes on Contributors Preface 1

Gender and Well-Being from the Historical and Contemporary Perspective Bernard Harris, Lina Gálvez and Helena Machado

vii ix xi xvii 1

Part I Gender and Well-Being in the European Past 2

Gender-based Economic Inequalities and Women’s Perceptions of Well-Being in Historical Populations Richard Wall

3

Measuring Gender Well-Being with Biological Welfare Indicators Aravinda Guntupalli and Jörg Baten

4 Anthropometric History, Gender and the Measurement of Well-Being Bernard Harris 5

Gender and Well-Being in the Pyrenean Stem Family System Marie-Pierre Arrizabalaga

6

Overexploitation, Malnutrition and Stigma in a Woman’s Illness: Chlorosis in Contemporary Spanish Medicine (1877–1936) Josep Bernabeu-Mestre, María E. Galiana, Ana P. Cid and Josep X. Esplugues

7

Changing Terms of Well-Being: Freedom, Security and Commitment on the Agenda of Finnish Nurses’ Associations Heidi Haggrén

23 43

59 85

103

117

vi

Gender and Well-Being in Europe

Part II Contemporary Perspectives on Gender and Well-Being 8 A Proposal for a Discrimination Index for a Non-neutral Fiscal Policy Paloma Villota

141

9 Violent Crime, Gender Inequalities and Well-Being: Models Based on Capabilities and Crime Data for England and Wales Paul Anand and Cristina Santos

157

10

Beyond Equality: Towards a System of Non-Androcentric Indicators Cristina Carrasco Bengoa

185

Living and Working Conditions: Perspectives, Concepts and Measures Tindara Addabbo and Antonella Picchio

203

Incomplete Women and Strong Men – Accounts of Infertility as a Gendered Construction of Well-Being Helena Machado and Paula Remoaldo

223

Time to Do and Time to Be? The Use of Residual Time as a Gendered Indicator of Well-Being Claudine Sauvain-Dugerdil

243

14

Summary and Conclusions Bernard Harris, Lina Gálvez and Helena Machado

11 12 13

Index

267 271

List of Figures 3.1

Male and female height from the first century to the eighteenth century 3.2 Height dimorphism in Bavaria, 1820–1875/7 4.1 Heights of boys in selected European countries, 1865–1997 4.2 Heights of girls in selected European countries, 1865–1997 4.3 Changes in the heights of male and female adults in different European countries, 1966–95 8.1 Differences between women’s activity rates in some European countries 8.2 Gender gap inside some European countries (EU-15) (in decreasing order) 8.3 Male and female labour-force participation rates, by age, in Luxembourg and Spain 8.4 Male and female labour-force participation rates, by age, in Ireland and the United Kingdom 8.5 Male and female labour-force participation rates, by age, in Denmark and Sweden 8.6 Excess amount paid by the first earner 8.7 Excess amount paid by the second earner 8.8 Activity rates of married women (aged 15–64) and index of discrimination of personal taxation 11.1 A fuzzy expert system on living in a safe and adequate place 13.1 A Saturday in Bamako 13.2 A day among the Dogon of Boni 13.3 A Saturday in Bamako. Time use profile of young men 13.4 A Saturday in Bamako. Time use profiles of young women

50 52 69 70 76 143 143 144 146 147 151 151 154 219 252 253 254 255

This page has been left blank intentionally

List of Tables 1.1 Indicators for the measurement of relative national standards of living, 1937 7 2.1 Weekly expenditure (in pence) of four person household of agricultural labourer and estimated expenditure required for maintenance of a widow or spinster in Stogursey, Somerset, in 1795 25 2.2 Weekly earnings of family head and entire family and expenditure on rent (in pence) by different families resident in the London working class parish of St George in the East in 1845 27 2.3 Frequency of consumption of ‘animal food’ by different families in London working class parish of St George in the East in 1845 28 4.1 Average heights of children in different European countries, 1865–1940 66 4.2 Average heights of children in Oslo, 1940–45 67 4.3 Average heights of children in Jena, 1921–54 68 4.4 Height, weight and BMI in different parts of Europe, 1883–1997 72 6.1 Distribution (in percentages) of deaths according to the cause of death at the beginning of the transition in the healthcare system 107 8.1 Activity rate for women and men (as % of the working-age population 15–64) 142 8.2 Activity rate, by age (Luxembourg and Spain) 145 8.3 Activity rate, by age (Ireland and the United Kingdom) 145 8.4 Activity rate, by age (Denmark and Sweden) 148 8.5 Classification of European tax systems 149 8.6 Fiscal index 153 162 9.1 Self-reported experience of violence by gender 9.2 Distribution of all types of experienced violence across several economic characteristics 163 9.3 Self-reported violence-related capabilities by gender 167 9.4 Correlation matrix of all self-reported violence-related variables 167 9.5 Identifying the more vulnerable groups by gender: probit models of each type of experienced violence 168 9.6 Ordered probit models of the self-reported safety variables by gender 172 9.7 Ordered probit models of the self-reported vulnerability and expectations variables by gender 174


9.8 Ordered probit models of well-being deprivation by gender 10.1 Categories for the proposed ‘Capabilities Vector’ 11.1 Type of work by sex and area 11.2 Mean yearly net individual incomes 2002 in euros 11.3 Total time allocation, men and women over 14 11.4 Average age in relation to health problems 11.5 Probit model on people experiencing health problems with a negative effect on daily life 11.6 Probit models on being employed with health problems by gender (16–64) 11.7 Family average labour income (at least one labourer in the family and pensions included) and housing rent 12.1 Interviewees’ occupations

176 190 207 207 209 212 213 214 217 228

Notes on Contributors Tindara Addabbo is Associate Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Economics at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy). Her interests include work on the gendered impact of public and social policy, the application of the capabilities approach to the measurement of well-being, and wage discrimination. Her publications include ‘Unpaid work by gender in Italy’, in A. Picchio ed., Unpaid Work and the Economy (Routledge, 2003) and she is currently co-editing (with Giovanni Solinas) Non-standard Employment and Quality of Work: The Case of Italy (Springer Verlag, forthcoming). Paul Anand is Professor of Economics, Decision Sciences and Philosophy at the Open University and Research Associate in Health Economics at Oxford University. He has written widely on the foundations of economic theory in work that is published in his Foundations of Rational Choice Under Risk (1995) and the Handbook of Rational and Social Choice (2009), both published by Oxford University Press. Currently, he leads an international project that is one of the first in the world to develop data instruments that fully operationalise the capabilities approach to welfare economics, economic development and the measurement of health. His work has been funded by a number of organisations including the ESRC, AHRB, NHS and OECD. Previously he has held Research Fellowships in Oxford, Cambridge and York Universities and recently he was elected a Fellow of the Human Capabilities and Development Association. Marie-Pierre Arrizabalaga is an Associate Professor of US history and US economy at the University of Cergy-Pontoise (France). She has published widely in areas relating to the history of the family, inheritance and emigration to America. She has recently edited a volume on women and emigration to North America in Histoire Sociale/Social History, Vol. 40, no. 80, Novembre/ November 2007. She also co-edited a volume on inheritance with Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux in The History of the Family: An International Quarterly, Vol. 10, no. 3, 2005. Her most recent publications are: ‘Basque migration and inheritance in the nineteenth century’, in Annemarie Steidl, Josef Ehmer, Stan Nadel and Hermann Zeitlhofer eds., European Mobility Internal, International, and Transatlantic Moves in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries (V&R Unipress, 2008); ‘Peter Laslett et la famille pyrénéenne: bilan et débats’, in Francisco García González ed., La historia de la familia en la Península Ibérica (SS. XVI XIX). Balance regional y perspectivas (Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), 2008) and ‘Destins de femmes dans les Pyrénées

xii


au XIXe siècle: le cas basque’, Numéro spécial: Itinéraires féminins. Annales de démographie historique, 2006, 2. Jörg Baten is Professor of Economic History at the University of Tübingen, Germany. He has published widely in the areas relating to the econometric history of firms, the study of welfare development and growth in economies around the world, and the long-run development of education and human capital in the global perspective. He co-edited a special issue of Social Science History (on the theme of anthropometric history) in 2004 and The Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective (Franz Steiner Verlag, 1998). Recent papers include ‘Heights, inequality, and trade in the Latin American periphery, 1950-2004’, Economics and Human Biology, forthcoming) and ‘Agricultural specialization and height in ancient and medieval Europe’, Explorations in Economic History, 2008). Josep Bernabeu-Mestre is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Alicante (Spain). His principal field of research is the history of the public health (including work on public health and nutrition, maternal and child health care and historical epidemiology in contemporary Spain). His most recent books are La salud y el estado. El movimiento sanitario internacional y la administración española (1851–1945) (in collaboration with Josep Lluís Barona) (Valencia: PUV, 2008) and La salut pública que no va poder ser. José Estellés Salarich (1896– 1990): una aportació valenciana a la sanitat espanyola contemporània (Valencia: Consell Valencià de Cultura, 2007). Cristina Carrasco Bengoa is a Professor in the Economic Theory Department at the University of Barcelona, Spain. She is a member of the Institute of Gender and Women’s Studies of the Universities of Catalonia and of the International Association for Feminist Economics. She has published several books and papers on women’s paid and unpaid work, new indicators of women’s work and economic models of social reproduction. Her most recent publications include Compte satèl.lit de la producció domèstica de les llars de Cataluña (Generalitat de Cataluña 2007); ‘Michèle Pujol: historiadora del pensamiento económico’, in Luis Perdices and Elena Gallego, eds., Mujeres economistas (Madrid: Ecobook 2007) and ‘Les coûts invisibles des soins et du travail des femmes’, Nouvelles questions feministes, 26 (2), 2007. Cristina Borderias is Full Professor of Modern History at the University of Barcelona (Spain) and has published widely in areas relating to the history of women’s work and living standards in Spain. Her most recent books are Género y políticas del trabajo en la España contemporánea (Barcelona: Icaria editorial, 2007) and Historia de las mujeres: perspectivas actuales (Barcelona: Icaria editorial, 2008). Her current work includes a collaborative research project on the history of female activity in Catalonia and an international project on the reconstruction of female activity rates in Europe.

Notes on Contributors

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Ana P. Cid, MD is a Research Student in the Doctoral Programme of Public Health at the University of Alicante (Spain). Her field of research is neurasthenia in Spanish contemporary medicine (1877–1936). Josep X. Esplugues possesses an MD and a PhD and is an Assistant Professor in the History of Science at the University of Alicante (Spain). His principal field of research is the historical epidemiology and the history of nutrition. His most recent book is La lluita per la vida a la dénia contemporània : mort i malaltia en el segle XIX i primer terç del XX (Dènia: Ajuntament de Dènia, 2002). María E. Galiana is Professor of Community Nursing at the University of Alicante (Spain). Her principal fields of research are the history of rural and environmental health and nursing and child health care in contemporary Spain. Lina Gálvez is Professor of Economic History at Pablo de Olavide University in Seville, Spain and a member of the Economic History Research Institute Laureano Figuerola at the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid. She is also active in the Andalusian Statistical Council and the Spanish Economic History Association. Her most recent book is Estadísticas historicas del mercado de trabajo en Andalucía (Sevilla: Instituto de Estadística de Andalucía, 2008), and she has co-edited a number of books and special journal issues, including ¿Privilegios o eficiencia? Mujeres y hombres en los mercados de trabajo (Alicante, 2003), and The Business of Addiction (Business History, 2005). Aravinda Guntupalli is a Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Southampton (UK). Her current areas of research include gender-differentials in well-being, nutritional transition, biological welfare and reproductive health. Her recent publications include: ‘The development and inequality of heights in North, West, and East India 1915–1944’, Explorations in Economic History, 2006 and ‘The causes, consequences and perceptions of Chenchu Tribe on infertility’, Journal of Infant and Reproductive Psychology, 2004. Heidi Haggrén is a researcher at the Department of Social Science History, University of Helsinki and coordinator of a Nordic Centre of Excellence Research Programme entitled ‘The Nordic Welfare State – Historical Foundations and Future Challenges’. She is currently preparing her PhD on the development of collectiveinterest articulation of Finnish nurses after the Second World War. Her research interests include the Nordic welfare state and industrial relations, especially in the service sector, and Nordic cooperation. Bernard Harris is Professor of the History of Social Policy at the University of Southampton (UK) and has published widely in areas relating to the history of health and well-being and the history of social policy. His most recent books

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are The Origins of the British Welfare State: Society, State and Social Welfare in England and Wales, 1800-1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Charity and Mutual Aid in Europe and North America since 1800 (co-edited with Paul Bridgen and published by Routledge in 2007). His current work includes a collaborative research project on the history of morbidity and a coauthored study of the history of human health in Europe and America, entitled Nutrition, Health and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700, for publication by Cambridge University Press in 2009/10. Helena Machado is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Deputy Director of the Research Centre for the Social Sciences, University of Minho. She is also an Associate Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra. Her most recent books are Justiça tecnológica: promessas e desafios (Technological justice: challenges and promises) (Porto: Ecopy, 2008, co-author) and O sofrimento oculto – causas, cenários e vivências da infertilidade (Hidden suffering: causes, scenarios and experiences of infertility) (Porto: Afrontamento, 2008, co-author). Antonella Picchio is Professor of Economics at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Her publications include Social Reproduction: the Political Economy of the Labour Market (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Unpaid Work and the Economy: a Gender Analysis of the Standard of Living (London: Routledge, 2003). Paula Remoaldo is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Director of the Research Unit in Geography and Planning, University of Minho. Her most recent books are Guimarães para os Pequeninos – a influência do desenho urbano na segurança rodoviária das crianças (Guimarães municipality for the children – the impact of urban planning in the security of children) (Guimarães, Patronato de S. Sebastião, 2007, co-author) and O sofrimento oculto – causas, cenários e vivências da infertilidade (Hidden suffering – causes, scenarios and experiences of infertility) (Porto, Afrontamento, 2008) with Helena Machado. Cristina Santos is a Lecturer in the Department of Economics at the Open University (UK). She is involved in an international Gender and Tax project financed by the United Nations Development Programme and the International Development Research Centre. Her main research interests are intrahousehold decision-making and power and how this impacts on the well-being of its members. Particularly, she has developed some work on domestic violence and the impact of norms on the value and understanding of violence. Claudine Sauvain-Dugerdil is Professor and Director of the Laboratoire de démographie et d’études familiales at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Her domains of research are the life course in Switzerland, population and development,

Notes on Contributors

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and population and gender. Her main recent publications are: Prendre en compte le genre en démographie. Une lecture des parcours de vie des femmes et des hommes (with Marie-Paule Thiriat), Collection CEPED (Les clefs pour), 2008; Maternité et parcours de vie. L’enfant a-t-il toujours une place dans les projets de vie des femmes en Suisse? (with J.M. LeGoff, Cl. Rossier and J. Coenen-Huther), Peter Lang, 2005; Human Clocks. The Bio-Cultural Meanings of Age (with H. Leridon and N. Mascie-Taylor), Peter Lang, 2005 and ‘The start of the sexual transition in Mali: risks and opportunities’ (with B. Gakou, F. Berthé and A.W. Dieng), in Studies in Family Planning (in press, 2008). Paloma Villota is Professor of Economic Policy in the Department of Applied Economics in the University Complutense of Madrid (Spain). Her most recent books are Situación sociolaboral de las mujeres en la Comunidad de Madrid. Análisis de la desigualdad de género en España, Tomos I y II. Dirección General de la Mujer de la Comunidad de Madrid, 2000; La individualización de los derechos fiscales y sociales. Un modelo alternativo para España, Editorial Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales, Instituto de la Mujer (núm. 68 de la serie Estudios), Madrid 2001 and (with Ignacio Ferrari), Aproximación al análisis de las figuras impositivas del sistema fiscal español desde una perspectiva de género, Instituto de la Mujer (Serie Estudios no. 80), Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales, 2003; Instituto de Estudios Fiscales Reflexiones sobre el IRPF desde la perspectiva de género: la discriminación fiscal del/de la segundo/a perceptor/a, Instituto de Estudios Fiscales. Ministerio de Economía y Hacienda, Madrid 2005. She has also edited Economía y globalización, Editorial Icaria, Madrid 2004; Globalización y desigualdad de género, Editorial Síntesis, Madrid 2005; Políticas de Conciliación en la Unión Europea, Editorial Síntesis, Madrid 2008 and La carrera profesional de las mujeres en las Universidades Europeas: estudio comparativo (forthcoming). Richard Wall was for nearly thirty years a member of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, and between 2001 and 2008 Senior Research Fellow in the Department of History, University of Essex. He is the cofounder and one of the current editors of Continuity and Change, a journal of the law, demography and social structure of past societies. His publications include Household and Family in Past Time, co-edited with Peter Laslett, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), Family Forms in Historic Europe, coedited with Jean Robin and Peter Laslett, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Poor Women and Children in the European Past, co-edited with John Henderson, London: Routledge, 1994) and Family History Revisited, coedited with Josef Ehmer and Tamara K. Hareven, (Cranbury, NJ and London: Associated University Presses, 2001). Beatrice Moring and Richard Wall, The Welfare of Widows in Northern Europe will be published in 2009 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2009).


Preface Cristina Borderias and Bernard Harris

The chapters in this book are based on papers which were originally presented at a symposium on Gender and Well-Being at the University of Modena in Italy in 2006. The symposium formed part of a series of meetings funded by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). COST is an intergovernmental framework which is designed to promote international collaboration across Europe in areas of scientific and technical research. In 2006, 34 countries were directly affiliated to COST and 23 countries included participating institutions. There was also one country, Israel, which enjoyed the designation of a ‘cooperating state’. COST Action 34 is specifically concerned with the study of ‘Gender and wellbeing: interactions between work, family and public policies’. It currently includes individuals from 24 countries and is coordinated by the University of Barcelona. The Action is chaired by Cristina Borderias and the Vice-Chair is Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux. The Modena symposium was organised by Antonella Picchio and Tindara Addabbo, with the assistance of Lina Gálvez, Bernard Harris and Helena Machado. The Action has two central, but interrelated aims. Its first aim is to explore the impact of economic and social change on the lives of females and males using traditional indicators of well-being, such as income and wages, the allocation of household resources, access to services, and health status. The second aim is to explore the scope for the development of a new concept of well-being, and new social indicators, which reflect the circumstances of both male and female lives. It was hoped that the development of this concept would also contribute to the emergence of a set of new criteria for evaluating the impact of social policies both now and in the future. The Modena symposium was specifically concerned with the measurement of well-being in past societies and the development of a new set of welfare indicators for the study of gender differences in the present day. In addition to those sessions which focused directly on the development and application of different welfare indicators, it also included further sessions on the themes of health, the life cycle, access to resources, and the production of well-being in the household, and See www.cost.esf.org/?id=9#faq (accessed on 13 March 2008). The original prospectus for the Action is set out in the Memorandum of Understanding between the Proposer, Cristina Borderias, and COST, dated 28 April 2005. This can be downloaded from the Action website at http://www.cost.esf.org/index.php?id=320.

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these sessions were complemented by two specially-convened panel discussions which addressed the questions of interdisciplinary approaches to the definition and measurement of well-being and the development of new statistical sources. The organisers prepared a full report on the proceedings and this was accepted formally by the Action’s Management Committee in April 2007 (see http://www. ub.edu/tig/GWBNet/). This book seeks to build on the achievements of the symposium in two main ways. Part I aims to provide a historical introduction to the evaluation of the impact of economic and social change on the well-being of females and males in the European past. The chapters in this section seek to explore these issues by exploring such questions as the impact of gender on incomes and earnings (Wall); the use of height and weight as gender-sensitive indicators of well-being (Baten and Guntupalli; Harris); the role of gender in the formulation of household inheritance strategies in the Pyrenees (Arrizabalaga); the emergence of chlorosis as a ‘female’ disease (Bernabeu et al.); and the conceptualisation of well-being in the professional campaigns of female trade-unionists (Haggrén). The second part of the book examines the relationship between gender and well-being in a more contemporary perspective. The chapters in this section explore such themes as the impact of fiscal policy on female labour force participation rates (Villota); the relationship between violence and gender inequality in the UK (Anand and Santos); the development of ‘non-androcentric’ welfare indicators (Carrasco); the evaluation of living and working conditions in present-day Modena (Addabbo and Picchio); attitudes to infertility (Machado and Remoaldo); and the relationship between gender and time-use (Sauvain-Dugerdil). Many of the contributors to the original COST Action have been influenced, directly or indirectly, by the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Sen (1993: 31) argued that traditional indicators of well-being had failed to take account of what he called ‘functionings’ and ‘capabilities’. ‘Functionings’ represented ‘the various things that [a person] … manages to do or be in leading a life’ and ‘capabilities’ represented the alternative combinations of functionings from which a person might choose, and which they might achieve’. Although Sen was primarily interested in the well-being of individuals, he has also recognised that ‘the conversion of personal resources into functionings is influenced … by social conditions, including public health care and epidemiology, public educational arrangements, and the prevalence or absence of crime and violence’ in a particular location (Sen 2007). Nussbaum (2000; 2003) extended his approach by suggesting that certain capabilities, such as the capability of being able to live to the end of a life of normal human length and enjoying good health and adequate nourishment and shelter, should in fact be regarded as ‘central human capabilities’ which constitute a fundamental entitlement of all human beings, regardless of their gender. These ideas provide an important starting point for much of what follows.

Preface

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References Nussbaum, M. (2000), Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2003), ‘Capabilities as fundamental entitlements: Sen and social justice’, Feminist Economics, 9 (2–3), 33–59. Sen, A. (1993), ‘Capability and well-being’, in M. Nussbaum and A. Sen, eds, The Quality of Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 30–53. Sen, A. (2007), ‘Poverty, evil and crime’, Programe de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo, 5 October 2007. URL: http://content.undp.org/go/newsroom/2007/ october/amartya-sen-poverty-evil-and-crime.es?src=print&lang=es (accessed 20 June 2008).


Chapter 1

Gender and Well-Being from the Historical and Contemporary Perspective Bernard Harris, Lina Gálvez and Helena Machado

As the Series Editors have already explained, this book is based on a selection of papers which were originally presented to the introductory symposium of COST Action A34: Gender and well-being: work, family and public policies. All the papers have been extensively revised in light of the discussions which took place at the symposium and subsequent comments. One of the main features of COST Action A34 has been the broad range of social-science disciplines which have been represented within it and we hope that this interdisciplinarity has also been reflected in the construction of this volume. Although many of our contributors would describe themselves as either economists or as economic and social historians, the volume also includes contributions from individuals whose own disciplinary backgrounds include medicine, anthropology and sociology. The interdisciplinary nature of the volume is also reflected in the organisation of this introductory chapter. In Part I, we begin by looking at the ways in which the relationship between gender and well-being has been studied by economic and social historians, with particular reference to the long-running debate over the development of the ‘standard of living’ during the course of the British industrial revolution. We then consider the ways in which new ideas about the conceptualisation and measurement of well-being in the disciplines of economics and sociology have been reflected in the development of such concepts as ‘relative poverty’, ‘social exclusion’ and ‘human development’, before moving on to explore the emergence of alternative concepts of well-being in the more recent past. Industrialisation and the Standard of Living As the previous section has already suggested, the relationship between welfare, well-being and the standard of living constitutes one of the most important and long-running questions in the field of economic history. During the first half of the twentieth century, historians of Britain’s industrial revolution devoted considerable attention to the calculation of changes in real wages during the period between circa 1770 and 1850, in the belief that even if wages were not exactly synonymous See Preface.


with the ‘standard of living’, they were nevertheless a primary determinant of it (see, e.g., Clapham 1926; Gilboy 1936). This approach has continued to play a very important role in the subsequent development of the discipline, as more recent work by Feinstein (1998), Clark (2001; 2007) and Allen (2001) amply demonstrates. However, even though it would obviously be foolish to ignore the extent to which incomes and wages are related to well-being, it is also important to recognise their limitations as measures of well-being. Even if we were to confine our attention to the individual wage-earner, it would still be necessary to take account of a wide range of other factors including (but certainly not limited to) such issues as the nature and quantity of the work needed to obtain an individual income, the costs associated with the acquisition of the skills necessary to acquire such work, the conditions under which it is undertaken, and the goods and services which can be acquired as a result of it. However, even this would not allow us to take a full account of the relationship between individual wages rates and the wellbeing of society as a whole. As Hans-Joachim Voth (2003: 274) has argued: To the extent that wages rise because they compensate for urban disamenities or the riskiness of particular kinds of work, measuring income may seriously overstate gains in the standard of living. Also, while income at low levels of development is essential for purchasing additional food, housing or health care, it is also often associated with the purchase of products that harm physical wellbeing, such as alcohol and tobacco.

Several writers have also criticised the traditional approach to the measurement of living standards from a more explicitly feminist standpoint. As Horrell and Humphries (1995a; 1995b) have argued, we know rather more about changes in male wage rates than we do about either the wages or the labour force participation rates of women and children, and this has often led historians to neglect the contribution which these individuals might also have made to the aggregate income of the household as a whole (see also Camps-Cura 1998; Sarasúa 1998). It is also important to recognise the importance of non-monetary contributions to household well-being. Even when women and older children were not earning money, they were nevertheless making a vital contribution to the well-being of their own and other people’s households through the provision of a wide range of different forms of care and support (Chinn 1988; Ross 1993). Many writers have also explored the question of inequalities in the distribution of resources within the household. At the beginning of the 1860s, the government inspector, Dr Edward Smith, reported that male labourers in many parts of rural England ‘[eat] meat or bacon almost daily’, whilst their wives and children ‘may eat it but once a week’ (qu. Harris 1998: 418), and this pattern was found in many other parts of Europe during both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Germany, Stephan Klasen (1998: 446) has pointed out that ‘several authors discuss contemporary reports about women receiving lowest priority in food

Gender and Well-Being from the Historical and Contemporary Perspective

allocation, with the survival of women often being considered less important than the survival and well-being of livestock’. In Spain, Borderias, Pérez-Fuentes and Sarasúa (2007: 8) found that ‘although it is extremely difficult to quantify, evidence from travellers, reformers’ reports and doctors clearly [shows] that … women eat [smaller] quantities of food, of poorer quality, lower price, [and] in different places’. Although much of this literature is based on documented evidence from historical sources, it also draws directly on accounts from contemporary developing countries. In a famous article, originally published in the New York Review of Books, Amartya Sen (1990) alleged that more than one hundred million women were ‘missing’ from the world’s population as a result of sex-specific inequalities in the distribution of resources. It is difficult, and possibly even misleading, to attempt to draw a direct link between the experience of women and girls in today’s developing countries with those of women and girls in the European past, but it is clear that both girls and women suffered different forms of discrimination which had a direct bearing on various aspects of their well-being (see also Klasen and Wink 2002; 2003; Harris 2008). Feminist researchers have also raised questions about what might be meant, in the broadest sense, by terms such as ‘living standards’ and ‘well-being’. As Sen (1987: 1) himself observed: the idea of [the standard of living] is full of contrasts, conflicts and even contradictions … You could be well-off without being well. You could be well, without being able to live the life you wanted. You could have got the life you wanted, without being happy. You could be happy, without much freedom. You could have a good deal of freedom, without achieving much. We can go on.

These arguments are as relevant to our understanding of the lives of people in the past as they are to Sen’s own aim of understanding the lives of people today. During the last three decades, economic historians have utilised a range of measures which have been designed to reflect a broader conception of the nature of well-being. One such approach, inspired by the work of Nordhaus and Tobin (1973) and pioneered among economic historians by Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson, is to attempt to estimate the extent of the ‘urban disamenities’ associated with industrialisation by adjusting conventional measures of the standard of living to take account of changes in infant mortality and urban density (Williamson 1981; Lindert and Williamson 1983). A second approach involves the search for an alternative index of well-being which is capable of incorporating all the aspects associated with the ‘quality of life’ in a single measure. In 1984, Roderick Floud suggested that the average height of a population might represent one such measure because it ‘already include[s] the effects of environmental or exogenous influences on welfare which are not included within conventional measures of income’ and is therefore ‘much closer to what we think of as welfare or the standard of living than artificial constructs such as national income per


capita or the real wage’ (1984: 19–20). However, he also conceded that it was much more difficult to use height as a measure of individual well-being and that it was extremely difficult to isolate any single factor which might influence the growth rate of children at any particular age (Ibid: 22). In more recent years, a number of authors have sought to develop a third approach, based on the methodology associated with the construction of the United Nations’ Human Development Index. This index, which is directly related to Sen’s original work, attempts to summarise the welfare of different populations by combining information about national income (using the logarithm of gross domestic product per head), literacy and expectation of life at birth (Steckel and Floud 1997: 11). In addition to this, efforts have also been made to extend the ‘conventional’ Human Development Index to take account of other factors, such as civil and political freedom and democratic accountability (Dasgupta and Weale 1992). Crafts (1997: 634) concluded that when all these factors were taken into account: the correlation between real GDP per person and measures of the quality of life [in mid-nineteenth century Britain] seems to be weaker than for recent times. This suggests that an approach … based on capabilities and well-being may be even more important for economic historians than for contemporary development economists.

Poverty and Social Exclusion: The Absence of Well-Being While historians are interested in measuring changes in the standard of living over time, economists and sociologists have often been more concerned about identifying sections of the population whose standard of living falls below minimum accepted levels and to compare differences in living standards across populations. However, although many of these investigations are primarily concerned with the identification of the levels of income needed to lift individuals out of poverty, they are also directly connected to broader questions about the definition of well-being. In Britain, one of the earliest attempts to measure the incidence of poverty ‘scientifically’ was undertaken by the chocolate manufacturer, Seebohm Rowntree, in his home city of York, in northern England, in 1899. Rowntree tried to estimate the number of people living in what he called ‘primary poverty’ by comparing the normal weekly income of each household with the cost of those items which he regarded as necessary for the maintenance of ‘merely physical efficiency’. He also used the term ‘secondary poverty’ to describe those households which displayed signs of ‘obvious want and squalor’ even though their incomes were theoretically sufficient to lift them above the ‘poverty line’ (Rowntree 1902: x, 296–8). At the time of publication, Rowntree’s attempt to estimate the overall extent of poverty (including both primary poverty and secondary poverty) on observational or


impressionistic grounds was strongly criticised, and this led him to focus most of the energy he devoted to the study of poverty in subsequent surveys on the application and development of the ‘primary poverty’ line (Harris 2000: 72). In order to estimate the number of families in primary poverty, Rowntree needed to be able to identify those goods which were deemed necessary for the maintenance of ‘merely physical efficiency’. When he conducted his initial survey, he divided these goods into four main areas – food, fuel, clothing and rent. However, because he recognised that there was a difference between the concept of a poverty line and the experience of poverty, he also attempted to modify this poverty line in order to take account of the kinds of expenditure which were associated with living a ‘normal’ life in the society of his day. This meant that when he published his second survey of York in 1941, he based his findings on a revised list of ‘essential’ items, derived from his studies of the ‘human needs of labour’ in 1918 and 1937. This list included a number of additional items, including expenditure on newspapers, incidental travel, recreation, children’s presents, beer and tobacco, subscriptions to religious organisations and membership of sickness and burial clubs, stamps, writing-materials, hair-cutting, and drugs (Harris 2000: 71–5). As this list suggests, Rowntree’s conception of the nature of poverty extended well beyond the concept of subsistence, but he was reluctant to go further and acknowledge that one of the logical corollaries of the concept of human needs was that the meaning of poverty was also likely to change over time, and this was the major difference between his conception of poverty and the conception articulated by the leading British sociologist, Peter Townsend, at the beginning of the 1960s (see Harris 2000: 75). Townsend (1962: 210) went much further than Rowntree in arguing that ‘both “poverty” and “subsistence” can only be defined in relation to the material and emotional resources available at a particular time to the members either of a particular society or different societies’. In his landmark study of Poverty in the United Kingdom he expressed this idea in the following terms: Individuals, families and groups in the population can be said to be in poverty when they lack the resources to obtain the types of diet, participate in the activities and have the living conditions and amenities which are customary, or are at least widely encouraged and approved, in the societies to which they belong. Their resources are so seriously below those commanded by the average individual or family that they are, in effect, excluded from ordinary living patterns, customs and activities (1979: 31).

Townsend’s idea of relative poverty is arguably the most important conceptual contribution to British empirical social research in the postwar period. It influenced a generation of poverty studies in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., Mack and Lansley 1985; Gordon and Pantazis 1997), and is closely related to the concept of ‘social exclusion’, which has played an increasingly important part in the development of European social policies since the 1970s (see, e.g., Atkinson and Davoudi 2000). However, as several authors have pointed out, the concept of social exclusion is


also more wide-ranging than the concept of poverty, because it recognises that individuals may be excluded from the normal activities of their society by factors which are not, in themselves, directly or exclusively associated with the lack of material resources (see, e.g., Barata 2000; Sen 2007). This is also reflected in the Council of the European Union’s (2004: 9) definition of social exclusion, which reads as follows: Social exclusion is a process whereby certain individuals are pushed to the edge of society and prevented from participating fully by virtue of their poverty, or lack of basic competencies and lifelong learning opportunities, or as a result of discrimination. This distances them from job, income and education opportunities as well as social and community networks and activities. They have little access to power and decision-making bodies and thus often feel powerless and unable to take control over the decisions that affect their day to day lives.

From the point of view of this volume, the concept of social exclusion is particularly important because of the extent to which it recognises that gender itself can be a cause of exclusion from ‘normal’ social life. This is only partly related to the fact that women often face a higher risk of poverty as a result of differences in employment rates, pay and lifetime earnings. As the European Commission’s Expert Group on Gender, Social Inclusion and Employment has recently concluded, ‘there are [also] gender differences in how men and women experience the stresses and social isolation of life on a low income, as well as gender differences in health and life-expectancy, the experience of crime, and homelessness’ (Expert Group on Gender, Social Inclusion and Employment 2006: 7). Development and Well-Being As the previous section has demonstrated, many sociologists and social investigators have attempted to measure levels of well-being by identifying sections of the population whose standard of living falls below generally accepted levels, either because they lack the resources to purchase a minimally acceptable basket of goods and services, or because they are excluded from some or most of the activities which the majority of the population takes for granted. An alternative approach seeks to compare average levels of well-being across populations as a whole, either by comparing levels of national income per head or by developing more broad-based indicators of the ‘standard of living’. One of the earliest attempts to devise a suitable method for comparing national living standards was undertaken by the American food economist, Merrill K. Bennett, in 1937. Bennett identified fourteen sets of statistical series which could be grouped under three main headings to provide a composite picture of ‘the per capita quantum of goods and services utilised annually by the inhabitants of a country’, and these are summarised in Table 1.1. Based on these indicators,


Table 1.1

Indicators for the measurement of relative national standards of living, 1937

Field

Indicator

Professional services

• • • • •

Transport and communication

• • • •

Food consumption

• • • •

Deaths per 1,000 inhabitants, inverted Births per 1,000 inhabitants, inverted Percentage of total occupied population engaged in professional service Percentage of population aged 5–20 attending elementary and secondary schools Pieces of mail per capita handled by postal services Telephone instruments per 1,000 inhabitants Mileage of telephone and telegraph wire per 100,000 inhabitants Railway locomotives per 100,000 inhabitants Motor vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants Raw sugar per capita domestically retained Tobacco per capita domestically retained Tea, coffee and cacao per capita domestically retained Citrus fruits and bananas domestically retained

Source: Bennett 1937: 322–3.

Bennett attempted to divide the populations of these countries into five separate groups. The United States enjoyed the highest standard of living, followed by Britain, Switzerland, Holland and Belgium. The third group consisted of Sweden, Germany, Norway and France. The fourth group included Finland, Italy and Spain. The country with the lowest standard of living was Portugal and, like the United States, it also stood alone. Following the publication of Bennett’s article, a number of international organisations, including the International Labour Office (1938), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (1949) and the United Nations’ Department of Social Affairs (1951) carried out enquiries into different aspects of the standard of living, and in 1952 the UN General Assembly instructed the Secretary-General to convene an Expert Committee ‘to prepare a report on the most satisfactory methods of defining and measuring standards of living … in the various countries’ (United Nations 1954: iv). The Committee identified a total of 40 separate indicators which could be used to measure differences in health, food and nutrition, education, conditions of work, employment, consumption and savings, and transportation, but it was unable to identify suitable indicators for measuring housing, clothing, recreation and entertainment, social security, and human freedoms. It also


identified eight ‘priority indicators’ (expectation of life at birth, infant mortality, average food supplies, proportion of children in school, literacy, the percentage of the population which was ‘economically-active’, the distribution of economically active people by industrial and occupational category, and personal consumption), and three ‘priority synthetic indicators’ (national income, the relationship between changes in national income and changes in the population, and average expectation of life at different ages), but it concluded that the majority of countries lacked the data needed to measure differences in the standard of living under most of these headings. Its overall conclusion was that ‘it is not realistic … to expect that annual changes can be measured in the components of levels of living for purposes of either national or international comparison’ until more efficient methods of data collection had been developed (United Nations 1954: 59–64, 79–91). The UN also devoted considerable effort to the development of a standardised set of national income accounts, culminating in the publication of A System of National Accounts and Supporting Tables in 1953 (United Nations 1953). However, as Nordhaus and Tobin pointed out, national income, or GNP, is an index of production rather than consumption and cannot therefore be regarded as measure of economic welfare (see also United Nations 1954: 39). They attempted to address the problem in three main ways: first, by reclassifying GNP expenditure as consumption, investment and ‘intermediates’; second, by imputing values for the services of consumer capital; and, third, by making allowances or adjustments, for the ‘disamenities’ of urbanisation (Nordhaus and Tobin 1973: 512–3). Nordhaus and Tobin’s paper reflected a growing apprehension about both the benefits and the inevitability of economic growth (see also Steckel and Floud 1997: 10), and breathed new life into the search for alternative measures of living standards and well-being. During the 1970s, Amartya Sen (1973; 1974; 1976; 1979) highlighted the need for measures which took account not only of the size of a country’s national income but also the way in which it was distributed (see also Kakwani 1981; Dagum 1990; Atkinson 1997; Gruen and Klasen 2008), and Morris D. Morris (1979) developed the concept of the ‘Physical Quality of Life Index’, based on two health measures – infant mortality and expectation of life at the age of one – and an educational measure – basic literacy. In 1990, the United Nations introduced the Human Development Index, incorporating indices based on the logarithm of gross domestic product per head, literacy and life expectancy at birth (United Nations Development Programme 1990). Dasgupta and Weale (1992) sought to extend this concept with the aid of statistics based on indices of civil and political freedom, although the introduction of these additional variables made little difference to the overall ranking. Although the HDI is now widely accepted as ‘an alternative to GNP and … the neoclassical measure of “consumer utility”’ (Sharma 1997: 60), it also faced strong criticism as a result of its failure to take account of gender-differences in the level of development in different countries, and this led to a series of proposals for the development of more gender-sensitive indicators, such as the Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM),


both of which were adopted by the United Nations in the Human Development Report for 1995. The GDI attempts to identify differences in the level of human development with the aid of separate figures for life-expectancy at birth, education (a composite of adult literacy and school enrolment rates) and share of national income (calculated by combining sex-specific wage rates and employment rates). The GEM seeks to measure the extent of women’s participation in economic, professional and political life, using a combination of statistics based on women’s share of national income, the proportion of jobs in professional, technical, administrative and managerial grades, and women’s share of Parliamentary seats (United Nations Development Programme 1995: 72–86). However, despite these advances, neither the GDI nor the GEM has been accepted without criticism. As Dana Schüler (2006) has argued, the GDI is not in itself a measure of gender inequality, and therefore needs to be interpreted in conjunction with the HDI, and not as an alternative to it. However, even then it becomes clear that the GDI does not add a great deal to the HDI because it is largely dependent on the same sources of information about income, life-expectancy, school enrolment and literacy. This has led a number of commentators putting forward proposals for alternative indicators, such as the Relative Status of Women (RSW) Index (Dijkstra and Hanmer 2000). This index differs from the GDI in that it is explicitly designed to measure the degree of inequality within countries rather than measuring differences in the level of human development attained by men and women between countries. The UN also attempted to measure the degree of female empowerment by means of the GEM, but this index has also been subjected to criticism. As both Pillarisetti and McGillivray (1998) and Schüler (2006) have pointed out, the GEM may underestimate the extent of female political empowerment in certain contexts because it is primarily concerned with political representation at the national rather than local level. At the same time, the index may also overestimate the extent of women’s economic participation, particularly in developing countries. This is because the income variables are largely dependent on information obtained from the non-agricultural sector, in which women’s economic participation can often be greater. Well-Being, Happiness and the Quality of Life Although there is now a vast amount of evidence which demonstrates that there has been a substantial improvement in the material well-being of most of the world’s population over the course of the last century, many observers have questioned the extent to which these improvements have also been associated with increases in happiness or subjective well-being (see, e.g., Diener 1984; 1994). As the economist, Richard Layard (2005: 3) has argued: ‘There is a paradox at the heart of our lives. Most people want more income and strive for it. Yet as western societies have got richer, their people have become no happier’.

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One of the main problems associated with the development of what Layard calls the ‘new science’ of happiness is the problem of measurement; as Bertrand and Mullainathan (2001: 60) have pointed out, there is a natural tendency to be sceptical about the objective value of subjective statements. However, there is now a very substantial psychological literature which suggests that attitudinal surveys do reflect real differences in the way people feel and are not simply reflections of underlying personality differences. As a consequence, the results of these surveys are now widely accepted as genuine indicators of subjective well-being (Kahneman and Krueger 2006: 3; Clark, Frijters and Shields 2006: 8–12). However, although it is undoubtedly important to know how individuals feel about their own well-being, there are also dangers in assuming that this constitutes a universal measure. As Amartya Sen (1999: 62) has pointed out, ‘concentrating exclusively on mental characteristics (such as pleasure, happiness or desires) can be particularly restrictive when making interpersonal comparisons of well-being and deprivation. Our desires and pleasure-taking abilities adjust to circumstances, especially to make life bearable in adverse situations’. It is also important to acknowledge the possibility that our appreciation of improvements in objective standards of living may be undermined by the ‘hedonic treadmill’ of rising expectations. As Richard Easterlin (2001: 481) has often argued, ‘the increase in income itself engenders a corresponding rise in material aspirations, and experienced utility does not rise as expected’ (see also Easterlin 1974: 90; 1995: 36). One of the most controversial aspects of the study of happiness concerns its relationship to gender. During the last thirty years, it has often been pointed out that women command a smaller proportion of the world’s resources than men and tend to devote a disproportionate amount of their time to the performance of routine household tasks (see, e.g., Addabbo and Picchio’s contribution to this volume) but the majority of social surveys have concluded that there is little difference between women and men in the way they assess their own well-being (see, e.g., Offer 2006: 29; Van Praag and Ferrer-i-Carbonell 2008: 116–37). Many feminist writers would argue that this constitutes a good example of the extent to which the assessment of well-being can be distorted by the kind of ‘adaptive preferences’ to which Sen referred (see, e.g., Annas 1993: 281–2; Nussbaum 2000: 111–66). However, although one should certainly be cautious in interpreting the results of these surveys, it would surely be wrong to ignore them altogether. This is particularly true of those surveys which have explored the direct relationship between happiness and economic well-being. If it is indeed the case that continued economic growth has failed to make people happier, what are the reasons for pursuing it? In fact, recent research into the relationship between happiness and economic growth suggests that the real picture is a little more complicated than this summary suggests. In the first place, it seems fairly clear that income is correlated quite closely with happiness within countries; and, secondly, there is also growing evidence that improvements in objective living standards can lead to significant


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improvements in subjective well-being in poorer countries (Diener and BiswasDiener 2002; Frijters, Haisken-DeNew and Shields 2004; Clark, Frijters and Shields 2006: 6). The main problem concerns the relationship between happiness and well-being in countries which are already wealthy and this is why some observers have concluded that the benefits of economic growth diminish as national wealth increases. If this is the case, then it is clear that one of the main challenges facing many European countries today is the challenge of devising new ways of living which are capable of combining continued economic growth with an increase in subjective well-being. As many of the essays in this book will indicate, the search for a solution to this problem will almost certainly raise questions about the relationships between men and women, and between people of both sexes and their environment. Gender and Well-Being As we have already indicated, the remaining chapters are divided into two sections. Part I is concerned with the analysis of gender and well-being in past societies, and includes chapters which focus on both the conceptualisation and measurement of well-being among historical populations. Part II has a more contemporary focus. The chapters in this section are concerned with the definition and measurement of well-being in different parts of Europe in the present day. By bringing these papers together, we hope to shed new light on the origins and nature of genderinequalities at different points in time and explore the continuities between past and present. We also hope to contribute to the development of alternative sets of social indicators which may lead to advances in the measurement and definition of well-being in the future. In Chapter 2, Richard Wall takes a wide-ranging look at the relationship between economic inequality and women’s perception of well-being in a variety of historical settings. He begins by looking at the relationship between female and male earnings in a rural area of southern England (Corfe Castle) at the end of the eighteenth century and contrasts this with the situation which existed in the London parish of St George’s-in-the-East in the mid-nineteenth century. He then examines a number of different dimensions of well-being including health, leisure, workplace autonomy and the valuation of domestic labour, before going on to look at women’s ability to shape their home environment and their responses to adversity. Although he recognises the problems involved in attempting to evaluate such a diffuse concept as well-being over a long period of time, he concludes that The relationship between feminist and environmental approaches to the measurement of well-being is also discussed at much greater length in the paper which Lina Gálvez and Esther Velazquez presented at the Symposium on Gender and Well-Being in Modena in 2006 (see Gálvez and Velazquez 2006 for further details).

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even though income differences may have narrowed as a result of urbanisation, ‘evidence abounds that power within the household remained in male hands through their control, direct and indirect, of the household’s finances’. The following two chapters are both concerned with the use of anthropometric indicators to explore differences in male and female well-being. Aravinda Guntupalli and Jörg Baten begin by looking at the question of whether differences in the size of males and females – or ‘gender dimorphism’ – should be attributed to biology or to gender inequality, before examining a number of different settings in which male and female heights appear to have diverged. They use archaeological evidence to suggest that the gap between male and female heights, and therefore male and female living standards, narrowed during the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They then examine a range of published studies which appear to suggest that the gender differential in height widened in both Britain and Germany during the first half of the nineteenth century, before narrowing thereafter. In the final part of their paper they examine trends in the average heights of girls and boys in eastern Germany after Reunification, before concluding with a brief summary of studies of male and female heights in ‘middle income’ and Less Developed Countries and a call for further research. Although Bernard Harris’s chapter draws on a similar range of material to Guntupalli and Baten, he focuses more directly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and does not always share their conclusions. After a brief survey of the literature on the relationship between stature and the standard of living, he examines some of the main sources for comparing male and female heights and the methodological problems associated with doing so. He then looks at the available evidence of changes in the heights of male and female children in different parts of Europe during the twentieth century, before examining the heights of adults in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although his account draws on the many of the same sources as those consulted by Guntupalli and Baten, he is more sceptical of claims that there was a divergence in the heights of men and women during this period, but he also draws attention to new work on adult weights which may provide more unambiguous evidence of gender differences in health and well-being. In Chapter 5, Marie-Pierre Arrizabalaga explores different aspects of the relationship between gender and well-being in the Pyrenean stem-family system, which emphasised the welfare of the family and household as a whole above that of the individuals within it. During the period of the ancien regime, Pyrenean families sought to protect the integrity of their property across the generations by means of a system of primogeniture, but this system was outlawed by the Napoleonic Code of 1804, which insisted that all children should be treated equally. However, despite this prohibition, families in the Basque Country continued to use the inheritance system to ensure that their property was not broken up. The main aim of Arrizabalaga’s chapter is to examine the implications of this system for the welfare of males and females within each family. Although the welfare of heirs and heiresses was usually greater than that of non-heirs and non-heiresses, male


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heirs fared better than female heirs, and male non-heirs fared better than female non-heirs. Arrizabalaga therefore concludes that even though the Napoleonic Code was designed to create greater equality, it had the effect of increasing the degree of inequality between the sexes. In the following chapter, Josep Bernabeu-Mestre, María Galiana, Ana Cid and Josep Esplugues attempt to reconstruct the history of a now-forgotten disease, chlorosis, which affected – or appeared to affect – large numbers of Spanish women in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Although some doctors regarded chlorosis as a consequence of poverty and overwork, others attributed it to what they regarded as the ‘peculiarities’ of either female physiology or the nervous system, and this means that it is difficult to establish how far it represented a ‘real’ condition as opposed to a diagnostic category. At the end of the chapter, Bernabeu et al. point out that the ‘chlorotic category’ disappeared from medical texts and hospital statistics in the early decades of the twentieth century, but they conclude by asking whether the symptoms which had previously been associated with the condition were not simply ‘transferred’ to new diagnoses such as neurasthenia, fibromyalgia and, most recently, chronic fatigue syndrome. We return to the subject of health in Chapter 7, but in a very different context and country. In this chapter, Heidi Haggrén explores the history of the professional campaigns of Finnish nurses from the 1940s onwards. Her focus is not so much on health as an index of well-being as on the conceptualisation of well-being by a key group of health workers. As she points out, during the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries the professional image of the nurse was built on the idea of nursing as a vocation, but this could also be seen as a form of ‘prison’. After the Second World War, Finnish nurses sought to expand their horizons by campaigning for greater autonomy at work and greater financial reward. Haggrén argues that the concept of a fair wage became integral to nurses’ sense of well-being during this period, but their pursuit of this goal was nevertheless constrained by social norms and structures that had a gendered nature. In the opening chapter of the second part of the book, Paloma Villota examines some of the causes of variations in the levels of paid female employment among the fifteen member states of the European Union in 2001. Although she recognises the fact that employment itself is not the sole determinant of well-being and that levels of employment are likely to reflect the influence of a wide range of factors, including the provision of public services such as nursery care, her main focus is on the impact of fiscal policies. She points out that in some countries, each earner is treated independently and therefore enjoys a tax-free allowance on part of their own income, whereas in other countries the unit of taxation is the household, and so the second earner in the household is likely to pay tax on the whole of their income. She argues that this is more likely to discourage women from entering the labour market, because it means that they are subject to higher rates of taxation than women who live in countries where the second earner is taxed independently. In the following chapter, Paul Anand and Cristina Santos concentrate on one of the ‘central human functional capabilities’ identified by Martha Nussbaum in

14


Women and Human Development, namely the capability of living a life which is free from the threat of physical violence (see, e.g., Nussbaum 2000: 78). Using data from a survey undertaken by members of the Open University in the UK, they begin by comparing men’s and women’s relationship to violence under three main headings, namely the experience of violence, current fears and self-reported vulnerability. They then explore the interrelationship between the experience of violence and feelings of anxiety, and vulnerability, before going on to discuss the relationship between violence and ‘happiness’ or, to use their own term, ‘life satisfaction’. Their findings suggest that even though the risk of violence diminishes as household income rises, the most ‘conflictual’ households are those in which women contributed a higher proportion of total household earnings. They also found that there were marked differences in the type of violence experienced by women and men and that the fear of violence was strongly related to local experience. One of their most striking findings was that it is not so much the experience of violence itself as the feeling of vulnerability engendered by the experience of violence which has the greatest impact on subjective well-being. This was particularly true for women, although this may reflect differences in the type of violence experienced by men and women, rather than sex-specific differences in the way in which men and women respond to the same experience. In Chapter 10, Cristina Carrasco extends the argument about gender and wellbeing by presenting a series of proposals for what she calls ‘non-androcentric indicators’. She argues that the conventional approach to ‘gender indicators’ or ‘gender-equality indicators’ has failed to recognise the need ‘to break with the current androcentric model by naming and valorising the activities, traditionally developed by women, which have been devalued by patriarchy’. She then outlines a series of ‘capabilities’ and ‘indicators’ which build on the work of earlier authors such as Amartya Sen (1993), Martha Nussbaum (2000; 2003) and Ingrid Robeyns (2003). In the final part of the chapter, she focuses on two particular capabilities, and their associated indicators, which are designed to illustrate the broader dimensions of her approach, namely ‘access to adequate mobility and territorial planning’ and ‘access to care’. Tindara Addabbo and Antonella Picchio’s chapter is also informed by the search for ‘an extended engendered definition of living conditions that includes domestic and care work’. In their study of living and working conditions in Modena, they use a range of indicators to compare different aspects of women’s and men’s lives, including paid employment, income, unpaid domestic labour, health and access to safe, secure and adequate housing. Even though Modena is a comparatively affluent area, with high rates of both male and female employment and good public services, their empirical research still reveals the existence of significant levels of gender inequality in each of these domains. However, they also demonstrate the need for a more expanded concept of well-being, which takes full account of the need to achieve ‘a good and sustainable life, for everybody, as the tensions between the processes of production of commodities and social reproduction of people are not a woman’s problem but a deep structural contradiction’.


15

In Chapter 12, Helena Machado and Paula Remoaldo explore the question of reproduction from a rather different angle. Their main concern is with the experience of infertility and the different ways in which this is interpreted and represented by the individuals who participated in a qualitative study undertaken in north-western Portugal in the summer of 2005. They find that women and men respond to the experience of infertility in very different ways – whereas the women in their survey reported feelings of ‘incompleteness’, the men felt threatened by their incapacity to procreate and attempted to compensate for this by appearing both ‘cooperative’ and ‘strong’. Machado and Remoaldo also examine the ways in which the development of assisted reproductive technologies, or ARTs, contributes to these discourses. Although they are ostensibly designed to give women more control over their bodies, they conclude that the new techniques restrict choice by reinforcing the view that it is a woman’s biological destiny to give birth. As we have already noted, it can often be difficult to devise an objective measure of subjective well-being. In Chapter 14, Claudine Sauvain-Dugerdil describes her own attempt to overcome this difficulty with the aid of a time-use study conducted among 2000 young men and women between the ages of twelve and thirty in the west African state of Mali. She argues that the amount of time one is able to devote to oneself and the ways in which one uses that time can be used to capture both the objective and subjective dimensions of well-being, and her results illustrate the extent to which both the amount and the use of such ‘residual time’ vary by gender. Although the chapter highlights the need to situate time-use within the context of the value-systems within which it is embedded, it also demonstrates the extent to which such studies can shed new light on the relationship between gender and well-being. Although the chapters in this book vary considerably in terms of their choice of both period and location, as well as in their disciplinary backgrounds and choice of indicators, they are united by a common awareness of the impact of gender differences on traditional measures of well-being and the inability of many of those measures to capture the full complexity of both men’s and women’s lives. By bringing them together in this volume, we hope to draw renewed attention to the problem of gender inequality and the need to develop new measures of wellbeing – and even new ways of living – in the future. References Allen, R. (2001), ‘The great divergence in European wages and prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War’, Explorations in Economic History, 38, 411–47. Annas, J. (1993), ‘Women and the quality of life: two norms or one?’, in M. Nussbaum and A. Sen, eds, The Quality of Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 279–302.

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Atkinson, A.B. (1997), ‘Bringing income distribution in from the cold’, Economic Journal, 107, 297–321. Atkinson, R. and Davoudi, S. (2000), ‘The concept of social exclusion in the European Union: context, development and possibilities’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 38, 427–48. Barata, P. (2000), Social Exclusion in Europe: Survey of Literature, Toronto: Laidlaw Foundation. Bennett, M.K. (1937), ‘On measurement of relative national standards of living’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 51, 317–36. Bertrand, M. and Mullainathan, S. (2001), ‘Do people mean what they say? Implications for subjective survey data’, American Economic Review, 91 (2), 67–72. Borderias, C., Pérez-Fuentes, P. and Sarasúa, C. (2007), ‘The gender gap in consumption: Spain, 1850–1930’. Paper presented to the 3rd symposium of COST Action A34: Gender and well-being: work, family and public policies, University of Barcelona, 27 June 2007. Camps-Cura, E. (1998), ‘Transitions in women’s and children’s work patterns and implications for the study of family income and household structure: a case study from the Catalan textile sector (1850–1925)’, History of the Family, 3, 137–53. Chinn, C. (1988), They Worked All Their Lives: Women of the Urban Poor in England, 1880–1939, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Clapham, J. (1926), An Economic History of Modern Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, A., Frijters, P. and Shields, M. (2006), ‘Income and happiness: evidence, explanations and economic implications’, Paris-Jourdain Sciences Economiques, Working Paper no. 2006-24. Clark, G. (2001), ‘Farm wages and living standards in the industrial revolution: England, 1670–1850’, Economic History Review, 54, 477–505. Clark, G. (2007), A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Council of the European Union (2004), Joint Report by the Commission and the Council on Social Inclusion, Brussels: Council of the European Union. URL: http://www.consilium.europa.eu/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressdata/en/ misc/79595.pdf. Crafts, N. (1997), ‘Some dimensions of the “quality of life” during the British industrial revolution’, Economic History Review, 50, 617–39. Dagum, C. (1990), ‘On the relationship between income inequality measures and social welfare functions’, Journal of Econometrics, 43, 91–102. Dasgupta, P. and Weale, M. (1992), ‘On measuring the quality of life’, World Development, 20, 119–31. Diener, E. (1984), ‘Subjective well-being’, Psychological Bulletin, 95, 542–75. Diener, E. (1994), ‘Assessing subjective well-being: progress and opportunities’, Social Indicators Research, 31, 103–57.


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Diener, E. and Biswas-Diener, R. (2002), ‘Will money increase subjective wellbeing? A literature review and guide to needed research’, Social Indicators Research, 57, 119–69. Dijkstra, A.G. and Hanmer, L.C. (2000), ‘Measuring socio-economic gender inequality: towards an alternative to the UNDP Gender-related Development Index’, Feminist Economics, 6, 41–75. Easterlin, R. (1974), ‘Does economic growth improve the human lot?’, in P. David and M. Reder, eds, Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honor of Moses Abramovitz, New York and London: Academic Press, 89– 125. Easterlin, R. (1995), ‘Will raising the income of all increase the happiness of all?’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 17, 35–47. Easterlin, R. (2001), ‘Income and happiness: towards a unified theory’, Economic Journal, 111, 465–84. Expert Group on Gender, Social Inclusion and Employment (2006), Gender Inequalities in the Risks of Poverty and Social Exclusion for Disadvantaged Groups in Thirty European Countries, Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Commission. Feinstein, C. (1998), ‘Pessimism perpetuated: real wages and the standard of living in Britain during and after the industrial revolution’, Journal of Economic History, 58, 625–58. Floud, R. (1984), ‘Measuring the transformation of the European economies: income, health and welfare’, Centre for Economic Policy Research Discussion Paper, no. 33. Food and Agriculture Organisation (1949), Essentials of Rural Welfare, Washington: United Nations – Food and Agriculture Organisation. Frijters, P., Haisken-DeNew and Shields, M. (2004), ‘Money does matter! Evidence from increasing real income and life-satisfaction in East Germany following reunification’, American Economic Review, 94, 730–40. Gálvez, L. and Velazquez, E. (2006), ‘Well-Being, gender and environment, or the need to redefine the existing sustainability indicators’. Paper presented to the 1st symposium of COST Action A34: Gender and well-being: work, family and public policies, University of Modena, 26 June 2006. Gilboy, E.W. (1936), ‘The cost of living and real wages in eighteenth-century England’, Review of Economic Statistics, 18, 134–43. Gordon, D. and Pantazis, C., eds (1997), Breadline Britain in the 1990s, Aldershot: Ashgate. Gruen, C. and Klasen, S. (2008), ‘Growth, inequality and welfare: comparisons across space and time’, Oxford Economic Papers, 60, 212–36. Harris, B. (1998), ‘Gender, height and mortality in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Britain: some preliminary reflections’, in J. Komlos and J. Baten, eds, The Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 413–48.

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Harris, B. (2000), ‘Seebohm Rowntree and the measurement of poverty, 1899– 1951’, in J. Bradshaw and R. Sainsbury, eds, Getting the Measure of Poverty: The Early Legacy of Seebohm Rowntree, Aldershot: Ashgate, 60–84. Harris, B. (2008), ‘Gender, health and welfare in England and Wales since industrialisation’, Research in Economic History, 26, 157–204. Horrell, S. and Humphries, J. (1995a), ‘Women’s labour force participation and the transition to the male-breadwinner family, 1790–1865’, Economic History Review, 48, 89–117. Horrell, S. and Humphries, J. (1995b), ‘“The exploitation of little children”. Child labor and the family economy in the industrial revolution’, Explorations in Economic History, 32, 485–516. International Labour Office (1938), The Worker’s Standard of Living, Geneva: International Labour Office, Studies and Reports, Series B, no. 30. Kahneman, D. and Krueger, A. (2006), ‘Developments in the measurement of subjective well-being’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20, 3–24. Kakwani, N. (1981), ‘Welfare measures: an international comparison’, Journal of Development Economics, 8, 21–45. Klasen, S. (1998), ‘Marriage bargaining and intrahousehold resource allocation: excess female mortality among adults during early German development, 1740–1860’, Journal of Economic History, 58, 432–67. Klasen, S. and Wink, C. (2002), ‘A turning-point in gender bias in mortality: an update on the number of missing women’, Population and Development Review, 28, 285–312. Klasen, S. and Wink, C. (2003), ‘“Missing women”: revisiting the debate’, Feminist Economics, 9, 263–99. Layard, R. (2005), Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lindert, P. and Williamson, J. (1983), ‘English workers’ living standards during the industrial revolution: a new look’, Economic History Review, 36, 1–25. Mack, J. and Lansley, S. (1985), Poor Britain, London: Allen and Unwin. Morris, M.D. (1979), Measuring the Condition of the World’s Poor: The Physical Quality of Life Index, New York: Pergamon. Nordhaus, W. and Tobin, J. (1973), ‘Is growth obsolete?’, in M. Moss, ed., The Measurement of Economic and Social Performance, New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 509–64. Nussbaum, M. (2000), Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2003), ‘Capabilities as fundamental entitlements: Sen and social justice’, Feminist Economics, 9 (2–3), 33–59. Offer, A. (2006), The Challenge of Affluence: Self-control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pillarisetti, J.R. and McGillivray, M. (1998), ‘Human development and gender empowerment: methodological and measurement issues’, Development Policy Review, 16, 197–203.


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Robeyns, I. (2003), ‘Sen’s capability approach and gender inequality: selected relevant capabilities’, Feminist Economics, 9 (2–3), 61–92. Ross, E. (1993), Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918, New York: Oxford University Press. Rowntree, B.S. (1902), Poverty: A Study of Town Life, London: Macmillan, 2nd edition. Sarasúa, C. (1998), ‘Understanding intra-family inequalities: the Montes de Pas, Spain, 1700–1900’, History of the Family, 3, 173–97. Schüler, D. (2006), ‘The uses and misuses of the Gender-related Development Index and Gender Empowerment Measure: a review of the literature’, Journal of Human Development, 7, 161–81. Sen, A. (1973), ‘On the development of basic income indicators to supplement GNP measures’, UN Economic Bulletin for Asia and the Far East, 24, 1–11. Sen, A. (1974), ‘Informational bases of alternative welfare approaches: aggregation and income distribution’, Journal of Public Economics, 3, 387–403. Sen, A. (1976), ‘Real national income’, Review of Economic Studies, 43, 19–39. Sen, A. (1979), ‘The welfare basis of real income comparisons’, Journal of Economic Literature, 17, 1–45. Sen, A. (1987), The Standard of Living, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sen, A. (1990), ‘More than 100 million women are missing’, New York Review of Books, 20 December, 1990. Sen, A. (1993), ‘Capability and well-being’, in M. Nussbaum and A. Sen, eds, The Quality of Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 30–53. Sen, A. (1999), Development as Freedom, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sen, A. (2007), ‘Poverty, evil and crime’, Programe de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo, 5 October 2007. URL: http://content.undp.org/go/newsroom/2007/ october/amartya-sen-poverty-evil-and-crime.es?src=print&lang=es (accessed 20 June 2008). Sharma, S. (1997), ‘Making the Human Development Index (HDI) gendersensitive’, Gender and Development, 5, 60–1. Steckel, R. and Floud, R. (1997), ‘Introduction’, in R. Steckel and R. Floud, eds, Health and Welfare during Industrialization, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1–16. Townsend, P. (1962), ‘The meaning of poverty’, British Journal of Sociology, 13, 210–27. Townsend, P. (1979), Poverty in the United Kingdom: A Survey of Household Resources and Standards of Living, Harmondsworth: Penguin. United Nations (1951), Enquiries into Household Standards of Living in Lessdeveloped Areas, New York: United Nations Department of Social Affairs. United Nations (1953), A System of National Accounts and Supporting Tables, New York: United Nations. United Nations (1954), Report on International Definition and Measurement of Standards and Levels of Living, New York: United Nations.

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United Nations Development Programme (1990), Human Development Report 1990, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. United Nations Development Programme (1995), Human Development Report 1995, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van Praag, B. and Ferrer-i-Carbonell, A. (2008), Happiness Quantified: A Satisfaction Calculus Approach, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition. Voth, H-J. (2003), ‘Living standards and the urban environment’, in R. Floud and P. Johnson, eds, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain. Volume 1: Industrialisation, 1700–1860, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 268–94. Williamson, J. (1981), ‘Urban disamenities, dark Satanic mills, and the British standard-of-living debate’, Journal of Economic History, 41, 75–83.

PARt I Gender and Well-Being in the European Past


Chapter 2

Gender-based Economic Inequalities and Women’s Perceptions of Well-Being in Historical Populations Richard Wall

Careful interpretation of past censuses and surveys allows inferences to be drawn about the extent to which women in the past, even if poor in both a relative and absolute sense could still take a positive view of their life situation. A range of factors that could foster feelings of well-being can be identified. Specifically it will be argued in this chapter that perceptions of well-being will be positive to the extent that the following circumstances apply to the particular women: adequate nutrition, good health and protection from the economic consequences of lifecycle crises such as the loss of the breadwinner. Other relevant factors are the amount of time women had available for leisure, their ability to fulfil their roles in society whether paid or unpaid free of interference from other persons and awareness that other persons, particularly close family members, valued those roles. Later sections of the chapter measure women’s ability to impose their own imprint on their home and, when they made a will, to acknowledge particular family members and friends, and the different responses of men and women to personal crises. There are no doubt other factors determining well-being which ought to be considered but for those that have been listed at least some limited evidence is available. Earning Capacity and Nutritional Status Given the differences between the earning capacities of men and women, it is evident that the economic consequences of widowhood were much more serious for women than for men in wage earning populations (and perhaps also in other societies). For example, the 1790 census of Corfe Castle in the county of Dorset in south-west England reveals that the wage differentials between men and women Absolute poverty signifies that the standard of living of these individuals fell below a defined poverty line, for example if they were at risk of starvation through lack of resources, relative poverty that their standard of living was lower than that of other groups in the population with whom they might have compared themselves.

24


were considerable. Men employed as labourers were said to earn 6 or 7 shillings (72–84 pence) weekly, fishermen and carters 7 shillings (84 pence), masons 9 shillings (108 pence), clay-cutters 10 shillings (120 pence) and quarry workers 15 shillings (180 pence). Women earned much less. Just under two-thirds of unmarried women who headed their own household or lived as lodgers in the houses of other persons received between 12 and 16 pence from knitting. Half of all widows earned only 12 pence also from knitting. Apart from knitting, employment opportunities for women were limited but were better paid. A few women spun flax and earned between 21 and 36 pence. One woman was employed as a washerwoman and earned 30 pence. The best paid was the woman employed to teach spinning with a weekly wage of 72 pence. Wage differentials of this order clearly made it difficult for women to support themselves solely from their earnings. This we can see by estimating the expenditure needed to support one adult (female or male) at the same level as that available to an agricultural labourer (see Table 2.1). The budget has to be estimated as only one budget detailing the earnings and expenditure of a woman living on her own was compiled in the eighteenth century (from Cumwhitton, Cumberland in 1796). There are, however, a number of budgets that have survived for households of labourers that were still in the early stages of development with few children and all of those under five. A single adult, it is considered would need to spend on most food items about one-third of the amount spent by this labouring household to achieve the same standard of living. On the other hand, it is more difficult to determine whether one adult could economise on the amounts spent by a four-person household on rent and fuel. The estimates presented in Table 2.1 assume expenditure on the same level as by a four-person household and in practice less expenditure might be required, saving Throughout this chapter payments are reported in the currency of the time: pence, shillings and pounds. Each shilling comprised 12 pence and each pound, 20 shillings or 240 pence. The currency remained in this form until decimalisation in 1971 when a pound was defined as equivalent to 100 (new) pence and the shilling was abandoned. Budgets for a number of four-person households of agricultural labourers in the 1790s were included in Eden The State of the Poor (1797 vol. 3). A number of such budgets from Southern England and the Midlands were examined. The budgets differ in some details, reflecting differences in local economies and economic conditions when the budgets were compiled but expenditure on food varied within fairly narrow limits (82–112 pence per week) in the budgets examined but with somewhat greater variation in expenditure on rent (6.6–11.5 pence, weekly). Selection of the budget for inclusion in Table 2.1 was determined by the location of the particular household in Stogursey, a parish in the county of Somerset which adjoins Dorset where Corfe Castle is situated. The Cumwhitton budget is to be found in Eden (1797, 2001 vol. 2: 75–6). An exception was, however, made in the case of expenditure on tea and sugar (not separately distinguished in the budgets), on the assumption that poorer women in this period were particularly heavy consumers of tea. See Buchan (1826: 6–7). Expenditure on tea and sugar by a widow or spinster living alone was therefore calculated at half that of a four-person household.

Gender-based Economic Inequalities

Table 2.1

Weekly expenditure (in pence) of four person household of agricultural labourer and estimated expenditure required for maintenance of a widow or spinster in Stogursey, Somerset, in 1795

Nature of Expenditure

Bread Barley Yeast Bacon Tea and Sugar Soap Candles Cheese Small Beer Milk Potatoes Thread and Worsted Sub-Total Rent Fuel Clothes Sickness, births and burials Total

25

4 Person Householda (expenditure in pence)

% Total Budget

Widow/ spinsterb (expenditure in pence)

% Total Budget

22 30 2 12 12 3 6 0 0 0 14 2 103 10.5 1.2 9.6 8.4

17 23 2 9 9 2 5 0 0 0 11 2 78 8 1 7 6

7 10 1 4 6 1 6 0 0 0 4.2 2 41.2 10.5 1.2 3.2 0

12 18 2 7 11 2 11 0 0 0 7 4 73 19 2 6 0

132.7

100

56.1

100

Note: aExpenditure as reported in Eden (1797 [2001]) vol. 3: cccl. This household consisted of a man and woman aged 40 and 38 and two children aged 5 and 2. Comments appended to this budget identify that the increased price of wheat in this parish had reduced consumption and that labourers were no longer able to grow their own potatoes having exhausted their own supplies. bExpenditure estimated on the assumption that a widow or spinster would spend one third of that of a four person household where the eldest child was aged 5 with the following exceptions: (1) expenditure on tea and sugar would be just half that of the four person household, (2) any sickness costs and parochial fees for births, that burials would be paid by others, in particular the Poor Law, and (3) widows and spinsters would not be able to economise on rent, fuel and candles. Source: Eden (1797 [2001], vol. 3: cccl).

26


perhaps between 18 and 40 per cent of the expenditure on rent. However even if we assume that a single adult might escape payment of both rent and fuel (as they were paid by others) and all fees for births and burials, the evidence set out in Table 2.1 indicates that this adult would still need to find just under 32 pence for food plus a further 5 pence for clothes, thread and worsted, 6 pence for candles and one penny for soap. Reference back to the earnings of unmarried women and widows in Corfe Castle in 1790 shows just how far short almost all these women were from meeting such costs from their own earnings. Indeed this was possible only for the spinning schoolmistress (earnings of 72 pence). The best paid flax spinners were 19 per cent short while the women employed as knitters could only provide between a quarter and a third of the sums required for their own maintenance. A number of these women also had dependent children in need of support. Moreover, the standard of living of a labourer (even if it could be achieved) was itself not a high one. Almost three-quarters of expenditure by labourers went on food and more than half of this expenditure on food was absorbed solely by the purchase of bread and barley (see Table 2.1). Yet in many cases the evidence presented by Eden (1797 [2001]) shows that their earnings failed to cover even this modest expenditure. Fifty years later, a survey by the Statistical Society of London of St George in the East, a working class district in East London, also documented the greater earning capacity of men although the difference between male and female earnings was less than in Corfe Castle with men with families earning 2.6 times what women with children could earn and three times the earnings of an unmarried woman or childless widows (see Table 2.2 and Statistical Society of London 1848 [1974]). In Corfe Castle the earnings of males were six times those of the majority of widows while in the rural parish of Ardleigh in Essex in eastern England the occasional earnings of women constituted no more than ten per cent of those of local men in 1796 (Sokoll 1993: 122). One of the reasons for the smaller disparity between the earnings of males and females in St George in the East may have been that women in this community had a much broader range of employments. The 151 widows with children practised 21 different occupations; the 64 unmarried women and childless widows, practised 19 different employments (Statistical Society of London 1848 [1974]: 206–7). Even though there was less disparity between the earnings of men and women in St George in the East than in Corfe Castle it is evident that in St George in the East female headed households would still need to make some economies. These adjustments to the estimates are advanced taking account of the proportionate savings on rent made by widows and unmarried women and childless widows relative to the amount spent on rent by married men in the London parish of St George in the East in 1845, see below, Table 2.2. In a rural parish half a century earlier the savings might have been more or less than these calculations suggest. These (plus unmarried men) are the only types of household identified in the survey and in the absence of data for individual households no re-categorisation is possible.


Table 2.2

27

Weekly earnings of family head and entire family and expenditure on rent (in pence) by different families resident in the London working class parish of St George in the East in 1845

Earnings and Rent

Family Size Rent (pence) Earnings of Head (pence) Earnings of Family (pence) Rent as % Earnings of Family Income per Person (pence)a Number of Families

Men with Families (with or without children) 4.2 45 243

Widows with Children

Unmarried Men

Unmarried Women and Childless Widows

3.4 37 93

1.4 33 279

1.2 27 82

293

119

388

98

15.4

31.0

8.5

27.6

95

54

277

82

1651

151

64

88

Notes:aChildren in the households of men with families and with widows have been counted as half an adult. Source: Calculated from Statistical Society of London (1848): 208–9; reproduced in Wall (1974).

One possibility was to move to cheaper accommodation. Indeed Table 2.2 does make it clear that widows with children were paying less in rent than men with families: about 18 per cent less. Unmarried women and childless widows were paying 40 per cent less. However Table 2.2 also reveals that both groups were had to devote a much higher percentage of their household income to pay the rent than were men with families. Widows with children had to use nearly a third of their household income for rent – unmarried women and widows over a quarter. Men with families, on the other hand, only spent 15 per cent of their household income on rent. What this indicates is that despite the fact that female-headed households needed to make economies, there was such a strong demand for housing in St George in the East that they were unable to procure the cheaper accommodation they required. The necessary economies therefore had to be made from elsewhere within their budget and one option which they clearly adopted was to economise on food


28

Table 2.3

Frequency of consumption of ‘animal food’ by different families in London working class parish of St George in the East in 1845

Attribute

Animal food once a week Animal food twice a week Animal food three times a week Animal food 4 times a week Animal food 5 times a week Animal food 6 times a week Animal food 7 times a week Number of families

Men with Widows with families (with Children or without children) 14 49

Unmarried Men 2

Unmarried Women and Childless Widows 54

13

17

0

17

19

20

6

4

14

9

2

9

2

1

0

2

13

2

28

0

24

1

62

13

1370

138

50

46

Source: Calculated from Statistical Society of London (1848 [1974]: 213) reproduced in Wall (1974). For definition of ‘animal food’ see text.

(Table 2.3). The survey records how often in the week the different types of family consumed animal-based products. ‘Animal food’ was never defined but can be assumed to have been intended to include a much broader range of products than meat such as eggs, cheese and butter. Yet whether the term was always understood this way by those who participated in the survey is more uncertain, particularly if they only consumed small quantities of eggs, butter and cheese as seems very likely given their low incomes. It is probably sensible, therefore, to interpret the survey as reporting the daily consumption of meat rather than a wider range of animal-based products. The term ‘animal food’ rather than meat will, however, be retained for the discussion which follows. According to the survey, households of unmarried men were the most likely to consume animal food on a regular basis with more than 60 per cent of them eating it seven times a week and 90 per cent six or seven times. Men with families experienced a considerable reduction in their diet with 14 per cent having animal food just once a week and nearly half no more than three times a week. However, The distinction between animal and vegetable food was common in this period. It can be found, for example, in Buchan (1826: 45).


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the most deprived were clearly the female-headed households. Just under half of all the widows with children and just over half of unmarried women and childless widows consumed animal food just once a week. The impact of this meagre diet on the health of these women and in the case of widows with children, also on the health of their children, must have been considerable. The latter point reinforces the findings of Horrell, Humpries and Voth (1998) who noted the smaller stature of sons when the only co-resident parent was the mother and attributed this to inadequate income and defective diets. Other sections of their budgets where female-headed households decided to make savings were on clothing and furniture (Statistical Society of London 1848 [1974]: 213). The least well-provided with clothing were the households of widows with children of whom only just over a third were considered to possess sufficient clothing. This compares with over half of the households of men with families and of unmarried women and childless widows, and almost 90 per cent of the households of unmarried men. On the other hand the clothing of the members of households of widows with children was usually reported as clean. Both types of female-headed household were also more poorly furnished than were those where there was a male head although no more than a third even of male-headed households were considered well furnished. For female-headed households it was under a fifth. The cleanliness of the accommodation occupied by widows with children was also thought to be particularly deficient with under a third of widows with children living in accommodation classed as well-cleansed compared with just under half of the accommodation occupied by men with families, unmarried men and unmarried women, and childless widows. For widows with children this is further evidence of the consequences of having to provide for their dependants from meagre resources. Even within the households of married men, however, there is evidence dating from the early twentieth century that indicates that food was portioned out inequitably with many married women curtailing their own consumption and/or being denied an equal share. What little food there was, and the most nourishing items, a housewife might well decide ought to be reserved for her husband, as the fate of the family could depend on the continued good health of the major wage earner, and for her children. Such women were inadequately fed, and would have been well aware of this and accepted the situation. Other women may have been forced to curtail their consumption as their husbands prioritised their own spending (Payne 1991: 46). Widows and unmarried women when acquiring provisions for their own households would also have known that they could not afford the quantity or quality of food that was available to households supported by male earnings. The poor diets of married women as they concentrated on feeding their families were noted by contemporary middle class observers and have also been reported by their own children when writing accounts of their early life. See the accounts of working class women in London in the early years of the twentieth century as cited by Ross (1993: 55).

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Whether there was more widespread gender-based inequality in the allocation of food to different members of the household with boys, particularly if of working age, given preference over girls, is more uncertain. There would be some logic to the distribution of resources on this basis as from an early age male earnings tended to exceed those of females. This is apparent in the 1790 census of Corfe Castle and working class parents in early twentieth-century New York were willing to allow their co-resident sons to retain a proportion of their earnings once they reached the age of 18 while their daughters had to wait until they were 21. However, little direct evidence has been found that indicates that boys in general were better fed than girls. One exception is the account of working class life in Salford at the opening of the twentieth century as recalled by Robert Roberts. According to Roberts, it was small girls who were the least well fed as their mothers considered that they did not need much, ‘not the same as lads’ (Roberts 1971 [1977]: 109). Yet when in the same decade school medical inspectors began recording the nutritional status of children in Great Britain, in most, but not all, areas they reported that more boys than girls were malnourished.10 Health and Well-Being Poorer nutrition can also be one cause of poor health and indeed the Statistical Society of London did report that slightly higher percentages of women than of men in St George in the East were ill at the time of their survey in 1845: 4.2 per cent against 2.2 per cent with a further 3.6 per cent of women declared to be aged and infirm as compared with 2.6 per cent of the men (Statistical Society of London 1848 [1974]: 228).11 However, many other investigations of sickness rates for more recent times when there was no reason to suspect greater malnourishment in the general female population also report higher rates of sickness among females (Riley 1997: 167). One possibility is that the weaker males had already died but whatever the cause might be, higher rates of sickness for women than men would not foster any sense of well-being at least for this minority of women (and their presumably female carers). Nor would the inadequate nutrition of a much larger number of women foster a sense of well-being. Moreover many, even of the women who were less immediately at risk of having to seek assistance from the Poor Law in England, did become considerably poorer once they were widowed. When a In Corfe Castle both sons and daughters began earning when they were eight. At age ten, sons were earning on average 21 pence and daughters 15 pence and at age 15 sons 48 pence and daughters 23 pence. See Wall (2004). For the New York evidence, see More (1907). 10 Some of this evidence is reported in Wall (1994b) and see also Harris (1998:417). 11 The survey does not make it clear whether illness was self-reported or inferred by the investigators. It should also be noted that the survey reported a higher incidence of illhealth among male than among female children (2.9 and 1.7 per cent respectively).


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husband died leaving both a widow and adult children, any property he owned, whether in the form of houses, land, cash or goods was often shared out between the widow and the children for whom no prior provision had been made.12 Leisure Time The next attribute of well-being to be considered is the relative amount of leisure time available to men and women in the past. For this purpose we can use the information on the balance between work-time and leisure-time in the time budgets of members of peasant, craftsmen and labouring families assembled by Le Play and his followers in the middle and later years of the nineteenth century (Le Play 1855, [1877–9]); Ouvriers des Deux Mondes 1857–1899). The information collected included how much time within the working day each member of the family that was surveyed devoted to work – paid or unpaid.13 The time spent on housework and child rearing was included. Any time not accounted for can be considered time within the working day that was available for leisure. If leisure is defined in this way, the budgets indicate that men and women had on average equal amounts of leisure time – about 13 per cent of the working day. There was, however, considerable variation from individual to individual in the amount of leisure time available. For married women this variation was particularly marked. For example a quarter of the women married to piece workers had more than a fifth of their working day free for leisure while another quarter had at most just a tenth.14 On the other hand, surveys of leisure activities conducted in the twentieth century indicate that the amount of time that married men could devote to leisure exceeded the time that women had available. In 1989 Social Trends reported that men in the United Kingdom in full-time employment had a third more ‘free time’ than did women who were also employed full-time and 12 per cent more

12 Evidence on this point, based on an analysis of the provisions married men, who shared the surname of Farrer, made for their families in their wills between 1500 and 1850 is included in chapter 4 of Moring and Wall (2009). 13 Admittedly the time budgets are not always easy to interpret. In the first place, when the budgets were published (Le Play 1855, 1877–9 and Ouvriers des Deux Mondes 1857–1899), working time was expressed in terms of days worked per year rather than in hours per day as apparently reported by the families. Secondly, time use was based on a notional working day of ten hours (the average of longer hours in summer and shorter hours in winter). Outside this working day further time existed for leisure. Moreover, some individuals worked more than a daily average of ten hours, producing a working year of more than 365 days. However, as very few individuals put in longer working days the impact of the latter idiosyncrasy on the estimates of leisure time is minimal. 14 This variation represents the inter-quartile range of time available for leisure of 22 wives of piece workers. The results are reported in Table 2 of Wall (1997).

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than women who were employed part-time (see for example Payne 1991: 82).15 Differences between men and women in the amount of time they had available for leisure were even more marked in other societies. For example, in the Russian city of Pskov in the 1960s, married men in full-time employment had 78 per cent more leisure time than married women who were employed full-time although the latter devoted almost as much time to paid employment as married men (12 per cent less) (calculated from Tyazhelnikova 2006: 183). Taken at face value, these comparisons suggest that since the latter years of the nineteenth century there has been a marked increase in the time men have available for leisure relative to the time which women are able to find. Autonomy in Work Roles We will now move on to consider the issue of how much independence married women enjoyed when performing their duties of housework and child rearing, where there is evidence for some wealthier members of colonial North America shortly before Independence. Some years ago Mary Beth Norton compared the different types of claims for compensation which men and women presented to the British government for the economic losses they had suffered as a result of their support for the losing side in the American War of Independence (Norton 1976). Men, if widowers or separated from their wives, were unable to provide detailed lists of the household items such as furniture that had been lost. This would suggest that not only had they not routinely undertaken household chores but that they had not been actively involved in the purchase of equipment for the household. Women, on the other hand, did provide detailed descriptions of household goods (Norton 1976: 396). What, however they were usually unable to do (if claiming as widows or separated from their husbands) was to specify the monetary value of the houses, land, crops and livestock for the loss of which they were seeking compensation. On the other hand, providing they had lived on the property they were able to specify the acreage and detail the crops cultivated and tools used (Norton 1976: 391–2). If, rarely, they did express the monetary value of their losses, such information was based on hearsay or represented the opinion of a male relative (Norton 1976: 389–92). One widow was even ignorant of the terms of her husband’s will as regards the property to be bequeathed to her (Norton 1976:

15 Social Trends 1991: 170, Table 10.2, and see Payne 1991: 82. The only group of women identified by Social Trends who had more ‘free time’ than men were ‘housewives’ who had 53.3 hours of ‘free time’ per week in 1989 compared with 44.2 hours for men. Like Le Play, Social Trends reported time use only for part of the day. Le Play based his calculations on time use within a working day of ten hours (see above); Social Trends assumed seven hours of sleep for each adult.


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393).16 In this colonial society, therefore, the roles of husband and wife appear to be complementary rather than cooperative implying that both enjoyed considerable independence within their own sphere. The degree of autonomy exercised by the wives was, however, limited given that control of the family’s finances rested with the husband. Indeed this did have serious consequences for the wife, for example when, as a widow, she had to prepare a claim for compensation (Norton 1976: 394). These ‘loyal’ colonialists (at least the wealthier ones on whom Norton comments in detail) were relatively prosperous before Independence but there is also evidence for much more modest levels of society that different members of the household undertook different tasks. For example Le Play’s collection of 36 time budgets of peasant, craftsmen and labouring households from various parts of Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century shows that 21 out of 36 married women (58 per cent) had sole responsibility for housework and child rearing. When they did receive some assistance, this was usually provided by daughters over the age of thirteen with sons participating in housework only in cases where there was no daughter in the family or no daughter over the age of ten (Le Play 1855 [1877–9]) as summarised in Wall (1994a: 327–8). Within the family economy, Le Play reported that the only work which husbands and wives commonly shared was gardening. Husbands took responsibility for repairs of the house and furniture and the provision of food and fuel while wives prepared the food, did the housework, cared for the children, made, mended and cleaned the clothes, and in rural areas raised poultry and gleaned. Wives had many more distinct tasks to perform for the family economy: 123 are listed in the 36 budgets, an average of 3.4 for each woman. By contrast, Le Play recorded only 53 tasks undertaken for the family economy by the 36 married men, representing an average 1.5 tasks for each married man. Much of this sort of work involved husbands and wives working on their own. This was the case with just over half of the tasks identified by Le Play. When a married woman did work together with other family members, it was more likely to be with her daughter (a fifth of all tasks) than with her son or husband with each participating in 11 per cent of all her tasks. The pattern of task-sharing 16 This inability by wives to specify the value of property sits a little uncomfortably alongside the fact that many widows in the American colonies, as in England were appointed by their husbands as executrixes of their wills. As has been argued by Amy Erickson, appointment as executrix implies that when married, women must have shared financial responsibilities with their husbands or they would not have acquired the skills necessary to administer the estate or the respect that ensured that their decisions would not be challenged; see Erickson (1993: 221). However, Erickson does also report that the percentage of wives who acted as executrixes in colonial America did decline dramatically over the course of the eighteenth century and that the wealthier testators were usually less likely to choose their wife to be their executrix (Ibid: 159). In England the percentage of wives chosen to be executrixes of their husbands’ wills also declined from about 80 per cent in the seventeenth century to 60 per cent in the eighteenth century – a significant but not a dramatic fall; see Moring and Wall (2009).

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by married men differed in that their work in the family economy was more likely to be shared with their wives (a quarter of all their tasks) than with either their sons or daughters (about a fifth of all tasks). Such widespread division of labour in the allocation of work within the family economy allowed for a considerable degree of autonomy in both the planning and performance of the various tasks. Yet this autonomy was also limited in a number of important ways. In the first place the tasks were complementary in that the wellbeing of the whole household depended on each task being performed efficiently. A slovenly housewife or a lazy or spendthrift husband was likely to give rise to strife within the family. Secondly, although very little is known about how tasks were allocated within the family economy, in the vast majority of cases free choice is not likely to have been an option, particularly as regards the amount of housework undertaken by married women. Some autonomy for married women in the sphere of work may therefore have existed but the choice of sphere was restricted both by custom and by the decisions and needs of other members of the household. Such constraints on the autonomy of married women as to the sort of work they undertook were particularly evident in poor families. In these families, decisions taken by a husband could have immediate consequences both for his wife and for the whole household economy. For example, one advice manual directed at Irish peasant populations in the early nineteenth century indicated that husbands could stipulate what products the household could afford to consume and what work the wife might undertake outside the household (Leadbeater 1812: 48–50, 54–5, 58–9). The same advice manual also counselled peasant women on how to exercise restraint when voicing complaints, to approach in a conciliatory manner such contentious issues as the excessive consumption of alcohol by their spouse and to undertake themselves the redecoration of their cottage if the husband was too exhausted (or perhaps too lazy). Admittedly the advice offered in manuals, even in the more practical ones like those of Leadbeater which provided recipes designed for poor people who could rarely purchase meat, could present a distorted image of the reality of household life. However, it is significant that she thought it was feasible to urge husband and wife to cooperate in order to improve the management of peasant households and thereby avoid arguments and economic disasters. A wife’s autonomy in her own work sphere but also that of her husband (although probably to a more limited extent), was therefore limited because their poverty necessitated their collaboration. Even in the much more affluent populations of the present-day western world, the successful management of the household budget depends critically on both husband and wife limiting their personal spending: in other words limiting their autonomy, freely or otherwise, in order to promote the well-being of the household. Just how this might work in practice was made clear in Pahl’s 1989 investigation of how 102 married couples in Kent in south-east England managed their money. Just under two-thirds had joint bank accounts (Pahl 1989: 89) although it was the husband whom Pahl identified as more likely (60 per cent of couples) to have ultimate control of the household’s finances. The wealthier the household, the


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more likely it was that the husband would control the household’s finances (Pahl 1989: 107). The majority of the women interviewed (that is all the women in the survey, not just the wealthier ones) also reported that decisions about how the housekeeping budget should be spent were either taken by their husbands (36 per cent) or were shared (24 per cent) (Pahl 1989: 90). The autonomy of these married women to decide how housekeeping money should be spent was therefore limited, in some cases because decisions on expenditure were made jointly with their husbands and/or because their husbands controlled the finances. Valuation of Women’s Work A more positive impression of women’s well-being emerges from a consideration of the final two factors identified as likely to promote feelings of well-being: appreciation of the work they undertook and their ability to control their immediate environment, however mean that environment might be. One guide to the value accorded to women’s work is provided by the payments which various public bodies were prepared to authorise for specific housekeeping skills. For example, when Justices of the Peace met in Oakham, Rutland, in 1610 to set the maximum rates of pay for particular types of work, they stipulated that the best woman servant could be paid 14 per cent more than the second most skilled woman servant and two-thirds more than the least skilled. It is true that the payment of these premiums did not result in the equalisation of maximum rates of pay for men and women. However, the rates of pay authorised were far closer to the rates authorised to be paid to males than the differential between male and female earnings in Corfe Castle, Ardleigh or even in St George in the East (respectively 6:1, 10:1 and 2.6:1; see above, and Sokoll 1993 and Wall 1994a). For example, the Oakham Justices set a maximum wage for the best male servant in husbandry that was 1.9 times the maximum allowed the chief woman servant and a maximum wage of a mean male servant that was 1.8 times the maximum pay of a mean female servant (Eden 1797 [2001], vol. III: xcv–xcvi). Another perspective on this issue is offered by considering the lower proportion of their earnings that males could allocate to their personal consumption when they were married compared with their position when they were bachelors. The difference indicates the price men were prepared to pay for having a wife to run the household, look after their children, work in the family economy and contribute her supplementary earnings to the household. If, for example, rates of pay were as in Corfe Castle in 1790 and if husbands did consume 50 per cent more of the household’s resources than their wives, then marriage would reduce male income from 108 pence to 48 pence, representing a fall in income of 55 per cent. It should be noted that such inequality in the distribution of the resources of the household between husbands and wives is still considerably less than the differential between the earnings of men and women in this population indicating that one of the functions of households in Corfe Castle continued to be that of

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transferring resources from higher paid males to less well paid females. Different assumptions about how income was distributed within households would of course alter these estimates. If, for example, husband and wife took equal shares of the household’s resources, male income on marriage would fall by 69 per cent rather than 55 per cent. Alternatively if the husband’s share of household resources was a quarter larger than has been assumed, marriage would only reduce male income by 44 per cent. The Impact of Women on the Home Environment The final factor of well-being to consider is the extent to which women were able to influence the character of their homes. Women’s imprint on the home environment is apparent in Norton’s study of American colonists at the time of Independence (Norton 1976) but their influence is also apparent in a much poorer population, that of the East London parish of St George in the East surveyed by the London Statistical Society in 1845. One of the more unusual aspects of this survey is that it recorded the numbers of households which owned books or pictures. Both books and pictures were then categorised, presumably after personal inspection on the part of those conducting the survey, as serious theatrical or miscellaneous.17 Income, the type of household in which one lived or personal preference might all influence whether a particular individual did or did not own books and pictures. In St George in the East in East London in 1845 the frequency of ownership of books and pictures varied greatly between the different household types identified. Households with children (whether headed by a married couple or a widow) were far more likely to own books or pictures than were households of unmarried men and childless widows and unmarried women. This would suggest that the amount of the household’s income had only a limited impact on the ownership of books and pictures as unmarried males were high earners. More interesting is that households of different types also differed in the type of books and pictures that they owned. For example widows with children and unmarried women and childless widows were less likely than married men to own pictures which those conducting the survey considered ‘theatrical’.18 In addition, all unmarried women and childless widows heading households which contained at least one book, owned ‘serious’ books. Unfortunately, the report of the survey failed to define what was meant by the use of the term ‘serious’ (or ‘theatrical’ or

17 Very few books were classed as theatrical, presumably because the time available for the survey precluded such categorisation. For details see Statistical Society of London (1848, 1974: 217), reproduced in Wall (1974). 18 The percentages in this paragraph report how many of the book and picture owning families possessed these different types of books and pictures and not the frequency of ownership of ‘serious’ books and pictures, etc. in the total population.


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‘miscellaneous’).19 What is clear, though, is that households which contained few if any adult males preferred to display more sober images when they acquired pictures. Unmarried women and childless widows were also the most likely to own ‘serious’ books. In the specific context of this East London parish in 1845, therefore, it is possible to see how even very poor women who headed their own households might be able to shape some aspects of their home environment. Amy Erickson, however, has argued that in early modern England, women with sufficient means, for example those with some assets to bequeath in their wills, were also able to extend their influence beyond the home by leaving bequests to members of their families and friends (Erickson 1993: 205–22), bequests that differed in a number of ways from those made by most men. Such bequests by women, according to Erickson, reveal the importance they accorded their female friends (Ibid: 213) and indicated that female testators were well aware of the potential or actual economic vulnerability of a number of these women (Ibid: 222). Most of their bequests were smaller and more personalised than those made by men. Personalised gifts may have had relatively little monetary value but were considered by the testator as likely to be particularly appreciated by the recipient and provide a long lasting remembrance of the testator. Whether these bequests by women were made to close or more distant relatives or to friends, more of the recipients would be women than received bequests in men’s wills. Women usually also made bequests to a wider range of kin (Ibid: 212, 215). However, as Erickson has also pointed out, recognition of a broader range of kin in the wills of women is to be expected given that the majority of these women were widows and their wills completed the process of devolving property that had seen the bulk of the valuable property transferred earlier by their late husbands either through inter-vivos gifts or in their wills. These women therefore did not necessarily have a wider network of friends than their husbands but were simply freer to acknowledge them in their wills. Coping with Adversity Just as there are many different aspects to well-being, there is a considerable variety of responses to adversity according to the severity of the crisis, the personality and capability of the persons affected, and the extent and nature of the resources they had already accumulated or could access in the case of necessity. We can take the case, for example, of widows whose late husbands had owned land. Widows who received land through the wills of their late husbands were immediately faced with the need to find a way of replacing the male labour that had been lost. This they might do by seeking the assistance, with particular tasks, of a male relative, particularly an adult son if available or by hiring male labour if it was not. Widows 19 As the survey was taken in 1845, it can be assumed that most if not all of the serious books and pictures depicted religious themes.

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could also choose to dispose of parts of the estate, temporarily or permanently (if they had been granted it outright) and try and live off the income this generated. However, these widows were also very likely to have to support themselves from a smaller property portfolio than had been available to their late husbands as estates were divided to meet the claims of other heirs particularly if there were any adult children. Nevertheless it is clear that some widows made an economic success of widowhood in that on their death they left more moveable property than had been bequeathed to them by their husbands.20 Erickson reports that the majority of widows in Sussex and Lincolnshire whose inventories she compared with those of their former husbands, left as much or more personal property than was listed in the inventories of their husbands (Erickson 1993: 193). However, comparison on similar lines for couples from parishes in Gloucestershire and Derbyshire, indicate that in these cases the value of a husband’s inventory usually exceeded that of his widow’s (see Moring and Wall 2009: Chapter 4). Attempts by poorer women as well as by poorer men to cope with adversity are well documented in their correspondence with the Overseers of the Poor when they were resident in one parish but were entitled to support from the Poor Law in the parish (which might be miles away) where they had acquired rights of settlement.21 The letters mention the cause of the distress (such as illness, death of a relative or unemployment) and the consequences such as want of food and clothing, and poor housing. Some of the letters adopt an apologetic tone while others are content with a statement of the facts and others plead for help. Regardless of the tone, however, most of the letters do seem to have succeeded in eliciting some financial assistance if not always all that had been requested (Sokoll 2001: 68). Admittedly the pauper whose name appeared at the bottom of the letters may not have written them herself or himself but both their content and style indicate that there was little recourse to professional scribes and that most of the letters were either written by the paupers themselves or by someone close to them – either a family member or a neighbour (Ibid: 58–60, 64). From the present perspective, whether or not the pauper women did write their own letters or not is irrelevant as it is clear that they had been able to develop a strategy which could secure the assistance from the Poor Law that they and their families needed. On the other hand there were certain circumstances in which women were far less successful in defending their own interests, as for example when they failed to secure an adequate share of the household’s resources. This could be because they saw the curtailment of their share as necessary in order to support or propitiate the chief wage earner or to enable investment in the next generation. Alternatively, they might simply have felt that this was how they expected their life to be or

20 The principal types of moveable property include cash, loans made by the deceased, leases, household goods and tools, and harvested crops (stores of grain, hay, etc.). 21 Sokoll (2001) includes transcripts of all the correspondence from Essex paupers preserved in the Overseers Accounts in the Essex Record Office.


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were too repressed to claim their due share of the household’s resources.22 Another group of women who felt they would be unable through their own efforts to escape their plight were the formerly wealthy American colonists studied by Norton. According to Norton these women loyalists perceived themselves as helpless even if they were not and that this may have affected the way they responded to crisis, for example in seeking charitable help rather than by looking for work. Male loyalists, on the other hand, never referred to themselves as helpless, even if they were, and believed that they would be able to better their circumstances through their own efforts, given some luck (Norton 1976: 406). The reason for these different reactions to the loss of fortune is matter for conjecture. Norton, however, stresses what are essentially differences in approaches to life with women much more emotionally involved with a spouse and children and thus suffering the greater devastation as a result of the death of the former and their inability to support the latter (Ibid: 407). The fate of these American women was clearly exceptional in that most had not only lost their spouse and all their economic resources but also their friendship networks which they found more difficult than men to replace (Ibid: 399). Nevertheless the desolation that these women experienced following the death of their spouse is likely to have been shared with many other widows. Perspectives of Well-Being in Time and Place The detailed evidence from Corfe Castle and St George in the East presented above has given some idea of the variation that was possible in the past between male and female earnings in different English populations. It is also apparent that the Poor Law authorities tried to ameliorate the consequences of these inequalities for women particularly those who had no adult males in their households whose earnings they could access. However, economic inequalities remained (Wall 2003). On the other hand, other factors such as the gendered division of labour within the household and family economy, the value which public authorities and these women’s husbands placed on this work, and women’s ability to influence their immediate environment, may have helped foster feelings of general wellbeing among women in widely different circumstances, ranging from wealthy Americans on the eve of Independence to the wives of European peasants and craftsmen in the mid-nineteenth century. With a concept as multi-faceted as wellbeing there should not be any occasion for surprise that some aspects of well-being suggest a positive image of women’s standing in the community while others yield a negative one. It is the latter that predominate. Even more difficult is to chart how feelings of well-being may have evolved over time. Many of the sources that have been analysed are specific to particular time periods and populations. It is also necessary to take account of how the social 22 See above and for the continuation of this pattern into the late twentieth century, the summary of a number of studies in Payne (1991: 80).

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structure and economy of Europe has changed over time. In the three hundred years since 1700, not only have the agricultural, industrial and service sectors undergone many transformations but there has also been a major shift in the distribution of the population, from rural to urban and on to an urbanised countryside and from employment in rural and small town economies to work in industrial cities and the predominance of the service sector. The evidence that has been presented here suggests that gender determined inequalities in earnings might have lessened with urbanisation in the nineteenth century while leaving inequalities in the access to household resources largely untouched. Even in the late twentieth century, evidence abounds that power within the household remained in male hands through their control – direct and indirect – of the household’s finances. References Buchan, William (1826), Domestic Medicine or a Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Disease by Regimen and Simple Medicines, London: T. Cadell et al. 22nd edition. Eden, Frederic Morton (1797), The State of the Poor, London: J. Davis; reprinted London: Thoemmes Press, 2001. Erickson, Amy Louise (1993), Women and Property in Early Modern England, London: Routledge. Harris, Bernard (1998), ‘Gender, height and mortality in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Britain: some preliminary reflections’, in J. Komlos and J. Baten, eds, The Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 413–48. Horrell, Sara; Humpries, Jane and Voth Hans-Joachim (1998), ‘Stature and relative deprivation: fatherless children in early industrial Britain’, Continuity and Change, 13 (1), 73–115. Leadbeater, Mary (1812), Dialogues Among the Irish Peasantry, Dublin: J and J Carrick for John Cumming and William Watson. Le Play, Frederic (1855), Les Ouvriers Européens, Paris: Imprimerie Impériale; reprinted Tours: Alfred Mame et Fils (1877–9). Moore, Louise Bollard (1907), Wage Earners’ Budgets. A Study of the Standards and Cost of Living in New York City, New York. Moring, Beatrice and Wall, Richard (2009), The Welfare of Widows in Northern Europe, London: Boydell and Brewer. Norton, Mary Beth (1976), ‘Eighteenth-century American women in peace and war: the case of the Loyalists’, William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series XXXIII, 386–409. Ouvriers des deux mondes, First series (1857–1885); Second Series (1885–1899), Paris: Société internationale des etudes pratiques d’économie sociale. Pahl, Jan (1989), Money and Marriage, Basingstoke: Macmillan.


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Payne, Sarah (1991), Women, Health and Poverty. An Introduction, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Riley, James (1997), Sick not Dead. The Health of British Workingmen during the Mortality Decline, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Roberts, Robert (1971), The Classic Slum. Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press; reprinted Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Ross, Ellen (1993), Love and Toil. Motherhood in Outcast London 1870–1918, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Social Trends (1991), Central Statistical Office, London: HMSO. Sokoll, Thomas (1993), Household and Family Among the Poor. The Case of Two Essex Communities in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, Bochum: Universitätsverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer. Sokoll, Thomas, ed., (2001), Essex Pauper Letters 1731–1837, Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy. Statistical Society of London (1848/1974), ‘Investigation into the state of the poorer classes in St George’s in the East’, Quarterly Journal of the Statistical Society of London, XI1I, 193–249, reproduced in R. Wall, ed., Slum Conditions in London and Dublin, Farnborough: Gregg International. Tyazhelnikova, Victoria (2006), ‘The value of domestic labour in Russia, 1965– 1986’, Continuity and Change, 21 (1), 159–93. Wall, Richard (1974), Slum Conditions in London and Dublin, Farnborough: Gregg International. Wall, Richard (1994a), ‘Some implications of the earnings and expenditure patterns of married women in populations in the past’, in J. Henderson and R. Wall, eds, Poor Women and Children in the European Past, London: Routledge, 312–35. Wall, Richard (1994b), ‘Einige ungleicheiten bei gesundheit und ernährung von knaben und mädchen in England and Wales im 19. und 20. Jahrundert,’ L’Hommel, 5, 94–126. Wall, Richard (1997), ‘Work time, work intensity and leisure time of peasants, artisans and labourers in the nineteenth century’, Unpublished Paper. Wall, Richard (2003), ‘Families in crisis and the English Poor law as exemplified by the relief programme in the Essex parish of Ardleigh 1795–7’, in E. Ochiai, ed., The Logic of Female Succession: Rethinking Patriarchy and Patrilineality in Global and Historical Perspective, Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 101–27. Wall, Richard (2004), ‘The contribution of young people to the parental budget’. Unpublished paper presented to the Fifth Meeting of the European Social Science History Association, Berlin.


Chapter 3

Measuring Gender Well-Being with Biological Welfare Indicators Aravinda Guntupalli and Jörg Baten

Measuring gender well-being for the period before the twentieth century is a difficult task, given that quantitative information is often lacking. However, some studies have employed height as an indicator for measuring biological welfare in general and gender differences in welfare in specific (to mention a few examples: Nicholas and Oxley 1993; Johnson and Nicholas 1995; Harris 1998a; Horrell et al. 1998; Baten and Murray 2000). We review these research papers and some others that applied gender differences in height as a proxy of net nutritional status, and health. Moreover, we will review previous research which has studied the gender inequalities during the Middle Ages, the early modern period that includes the ‘witch hunting’ period, the early industrial revolution in Britain, as well as still agricultural societies in other countries such as Bavaria and Ireland in the nineteenth century. In addition, modern societies in the transition from socialism to market economy were also considered for this overview. Our review considers the quantitative evidence regarding gender-specific well-being. In the following section we discuss gender dimorphism and gender differences in height, reviewing the biological literature on the topic. In the second section we argue that gender difference in stature is not a simple biological mechanism. In the third and fourth sections we report the studies on the impact of economic factors on gender differences in height and recent archaeological findings about male and female stature during the Middle Ages and the early modern period. We then discuss the problems and advantages of these methods by reviewing the literature that applied them for studying the welfare of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gender inequality in the transition period from socialism to market economy during the twentieth century is discussed in section six and we conclude with plans for future research in section seven. In this paper we use archaeological data of Koepke and Baten (2005) and Baten and Murray’s southern Germany data (2000) to support our discussion. Human Stature and Gender Dimorphism The average height of a larger population group is mostly influenced by the quality and quantity of nutrition, and the disease environment. Many economic historians

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used height as a measure of net nutrition and living standards (Fogel et al. 1983; Komlos 1985; Steckel 1995; Floud and Harris 1997; Steckel and Floud 1997; Baten 2000a). This literature argued that it could be useful to supplement the conventional indicators of well-being, such as GDP per capita, with other welfare measures, especially anthropometric indicators. In particular, anthropometric indicators have been successfully implemented to analyse living standards in historical and pre-historical periods (Koepke and Baten 2005). Moreover, research teams at the World Health Organization suggest measures of height as a principal index of nutritional status for both males and females even today (WHO Working Group 1986). Average heights were proved to be a successful proxy of economic welfare as heights are sensitive to nutritional status and health care. Historical data on mean stature were used to trace the trends and levels of well-being in a population. However, stature has only recently been accepted as an indicator for measuring gender differences in the biological well-being of populations. The final size a child attains as an adult is the result of a continuous complex interaction between genetic and environmental factors during the growth period (Eveleth and Tanner 1976). According to them, two genotypes that could produce the same adult height under optimal environmental circumstances produce different heights under circumstances of deprivation. Thus, two children that would be taller in a well-off community may be shorter under poor economic conditions. Moreover, one might be significantly smaller than the other due to the non-additivity of genotype and environmental factors. A child’s development may be stunted due to lack of environmental stimulus – that is essential for child’s growth – during ‘sensitive periods’. During illness, a child’s growth may slow down and in case of availability of better nutrition this slowdown is followed by a catch up. However, this catch up less often occurs among girls if there is bias against girls in terms of allocation of food and health care. At which ages is the influence on final adult height the strongest? The use of anthropometric indicators for measuring nutrition rests on a well-defined pattern of human growth between childhood and maturity that reflects the interaction of genetic, environmental, and socioeconomic factors. The average annual increase in height is greatest during infancy, falls sharply up to age three and then falls more slowly during the remaining pre-adolescent years, except for the teenage growth spurt (Fogel et al. 1983). Baten (2000a) found that environmental conditions during the first three years play an important role in determining adult height compared to the later part of the growth period. In contrast, the height of still growing children and young adults is also strongly influenced in the one or two years preceding the measurement of height. For those still growing persons, catch-up growth normally wipes out temporary influences until final adult height is attained. Thus, height data can be extended to study differences in the quality of net nutritional status and health care during early childhood between males and females.

Measuring Gender Well-Being with Biological Welfare Indicators

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The term gender dimorphism in stature (also known as Sexual Size Dimorphism by biologists and anthropologists) is used to describe the difference between male and female stature. Gender dimorphism is calculated in most of the studies as the absolute difference between male and female adult height (GD1). However some recent studies used the ratio between male and female stature (GD2). In this study gender dimorphism (Figure 3.2) was calculated as the difference between the mean heights of the genders expressed as a percentage of male height. GD1 = maleheight - femaleheight GD2 =

maleheight - femaleheight x 100 maleheight

Gender Dimorphism: Does It Reflect Gender Inequality, Female Robustness or a Default Biological Mechanism? Biologically men and women have differences in the nature of growth, final adult size and behaviour. Males tend to have a larger stature, and more robust cranial and facial features, along with greater muscularity and strength (Frayer and Wolpoff 1985). However, apart from these biological differences between men and women, other determinants like nutrition, health care, and disease might play an important role in determining stature differences between men and women. For example, malnourishment in young girls and neglect of immunisation against disease can create many hurdles for girls to attain their growth potential. If boys compared to girls are provided with better nutrition and medical facilities, then young girls will have a severe negative impact on their tempo of growth. In this context, how might we really distinguish socially-induced gender inequality from biological stature differences? Some biological studies emphasised a decrease in male-female height differences under conditions of nutritional stress (Wolanski and Kasprzak 1976; Gray and Wolfe 1980; Brauer 1982; Lieberman 1982; Stini 1985). According to these studies, dimorphism increases with improvement in nutritional status. Based on these findings and their biological theorising, they hypothesised that women are more ‘resilient’ during crisis periods. They argued that males are more susceptible to fluctuations in nutritional quality and show greater impairment in long bone growth compared to females facing similar food crises (Clutton-Brock and Harvey 1984). So a long-term nutritional shortage would not only mean a reduced adult height size in both sexes but also more impact on men. In this case, it is not possible to use height as an indicator in measuring gender inequality as crisis would mean lower gender dimorphism. However, there is still a paucity of Gender dimorphism in the formula is expressed as GD.

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information about the coping strategies if crisis affects males and females equally. We reject the argument of Clutton-Brock and Harvey in the later stages of the paper and argue for the use of gender dimorphism in studying gender inequality. The female robustness argument based on the above studies suffers from lack of good data. The sample sizes of all the studies that studied sexual dimorphism are too small to be reliable. This concern is especially applicable to the studies for prehistoric periods covering North America (Hamilton 1982), Mexico (Nickens 1976), Europe (Frayer 1984), India (Kennedy 1984), China and South-East Asia (Brace et al. 1984). All these above mentioned studies mostly focus on prehistoric time periods and have small sample sizes. Tanner describes gender differences in growth and regulation using data on Japanese boys and girls who were exposed to radiation from the atomic bombs (Tanner 1978). He argued that girls had an advantage as the radiation slowed down the growth of boys compared to girls. Though Tanner argues for the existence of female robustness in the situations of radiation and undernutrition, there is a dearth of information about sample size and physiological mechanisms. Apart from the robustness hypothesis, the argument that the sexual dimorphism is a function of stature questions the use of gender dimorphism for studying gender inequality welfare. Some biologists argue that sexual size dimorphism is positively correlated with height (for example, Brace et al. 1984). This positive relation between height and dimorphism implies that increasing height of males and females in general will see increases in stature difference between males and females. However, recent research does not support this hypothesis. For example, Moradi and Guntupalli (forthcoming) found that the mean stature of both females and males increased with food supply generally at the same rate. Their research on the Indian population between the 1930s and 1970s does not support the hypothesis of increasing dimorphism with increasing stature. They also showed that during the food crisis period in the states of Kerala and Orissa, an increase in gender dimorphism was observed pointing to a rise in gender discrimination. Guntupalli’s (2007) recent finding that Indians in South Africa had higher dimorphism compared to Africans and European South Africans due to Indian cultural preference for male children also supports the use of dimorphism indicators for studying welfare differences by gender. Clearly, it is important to review the biological literature on this question. Recent biological research also rejects the argument that dimorphism is a function of height. Gray and Wolfe (1982) pointed out that dimorphism increases with increasing mean height. However, Gaulin and Boster (1985) have countered that the findings of Gray and Wolfe are not reliable due to their small sample size. Recently, Gustafsson and Lindenfors (2004) tested if populations with larger stature exhibited more dimorphism using data from adult males and females over 19 years old from 124 population groups from the latter part of the twentieth century. They rejected the hypothesis of increasing dimorphism with increasing stature in humans using phylogenetic methods to correct for errors arising as a consequence of populations sharing a common ancestry. Phylogeny is the evolutionary history


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of a group of organisms and the modern phylogenetic investigations are based on molecular data, primarily nucleotide sequences. Basically, the more closely related two organisms are, the more genes they will have in common. Hence, Gustafsson and Lindenfors controlled for genetic ancestry to compare evolutionary dimorphism. What were the explanations given by biologists about gender dimorphism? Holden and Mace (1999) tried to relate sexual division of labour and gender dimorphism by observing 76 aboriginal populations. By comparing gender gap in stature and sexual division of labour data from the ‘Ethnographic Atlas’, they concluded that sexual dimorphism in stature is negatively correlated with women’s labour force participation. They argued that this negative association stems from sex-biased parental investment. Development economists, demographers and economic historians have frequently used relative indicators like mortality and height ratios to study gender inequality either in the pre-1950 developed countries or the recent developing countries, and made similar arguments (Dyson and Moore 1983; Nicholas and Oxley 1993; Klasen 1998; Horrell and Oxley 1999; Boix and Rosenbluth 2004; Guntupalli 2007). In sum, based on the evidence we have collected from previous research we conclude that there is not enough evidence to support the argument that dimorphism is a function of height (Holden and Mace 1999; Gustafsson and Lindenfors 2004; Guntupalli 2007; Moradi and Guntupalli forthcoming). However, more biological research is required to reject concretely the female resiliency argument. Besides, we can argue that reduction in female heights relative to male heights despite the existence of female resiliency is observable, simply because female discrimination is so severe that it outweighs the resiliency effect. Hence, female resiliency hypothesis supporters can still use gender dimorphism to study inequality by assuming that if women’s height declines, this might even imply a stronger downturn of food intake and health care. We should mention the caveat that for the recent period, food consumption behaviour patterns are complicated to measure at higher income levels. For example, teenage girls in rich societies might consume less food in order to be slim to achieve the standard set by the fashion industry. However, in the historical period food and health resources were scarce goods, and there were gender-related allocation conflicts within the households. Gender Dimorphism from an Economic Perspective What views from economic theoretical perspectives can be applied to the study of gender dimorphism? Apart from the biological stature difference between men and women, some other determinants like changing agricultural patterns play an important role. For example, before the twentieth century in Europe and some other world regions, women were more often specialized in cattle farming and garden work, increasing their ‘advantage of proximity’ to milk and vegetables. In contrast, grain cultivation requires more male upper-body strength than herding

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cattle; hence a grain-oriented society might distribute more nutrition and health resources to male offspring. When agricultural patterns changed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, for example, from cattle farming towards grainbased agriculture, we find a declining trend in women’s welfare as Klasen (1998) argued assessing relative mortality. In grain-based agriculture men play an important role and this devaluation of women’s labour by shifting from cattle farming to grainbased agriculture reduces relative female welfare. Moreover, if there is a preference for male work and male workers, women will face a double disadvantage. First, their proximity to protein reduces and second, their demand in job market declines due to higher demand for male jobs. But those ‘rational’ distribution patterns are not that simple to study. Ogilvie (2004) argued, for example, that while this sounds plausible, in early modern Germany almost all occupations in which males had seemingly rational brawn advantages, there were also active women. Moreover, they were actually actively excluded from those occupations not because they were unsuccessful, but because male competitors succeeded in creating institutions (guilds, etc.) to exclude them and limit their activity. Apart from agricultural specialisation, the expected income of girls which determines the relative parental investment in their female offspring could also be influenced by other labour market relations, such as the relative efficiency of female labour in factories, for example, or a labour market for female domestic services. In other words, parents develop a specific expectation of the income which their male and female children might earn later in life. The later income of their children will likely help them after retirement. Hence if women are likely to obtain substantial own income later on, girls receive more resources early in life in order to increase their survival probability. However, parents’ expectation is not the sole determinant of gender inequality and we need to consider cultural and other economic challenges boys and girls face during their growth to have a complete picture. There is also a need for empirical research to strengthen this argument. The relative mobility of marriage partners might also play a role. In this context, ‘mobility’ is defined as the mobility to leave the partner and the family. Boix and Rosenbluth (2004) have argued that male brawn that can be used for grain production is a relatively mobile factor, whereas female specialisation in child rearing is an immobile, family-specific investment. Given that most societies have the traditional division of labour with women performing more of the child-rearing, males have a better bargaining position by threatening to run away. Boix and Rosenbluth illustrated this with the empirical fact that in hunter–gatherer societies, dimorphism tends to be relatively small. When these hunter and gatherer societies switched to a sedentary lifestyle and grain cultivation, male brawn became relatively important for the grain harvest, and female gathering skills lost their importance. Hence the male bargaining position increased and dimorphism grew. Other than the biological and economic factors, disease and cultural factors can also play an important role in deciding welfare differences between genders. The relative exposure of women to disease also can play an important role in the differential welfare of males and females. For example, if girls are kept isolated


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in a household, their infection risk might be lower, in spite of the otherwise deleterious effects. On the other hand, if they have to perform unhealthy tasks in the household or if cultural norms dictate unhealthy behaviour, their disease exposure might be higher. Nevertheless, it is difficult to measure exposure to disease. Culturally-determined discrimination patterns play an important role and this was especially proved in case of some Asian countries like India and China. For example, Das Gupta (1993) argued that the relation between discrimination against girls and available resources has an inverse relation where acute scarcity results in gender bias. In other words, bad periods are particularly problematic for women, whereas with improving overall welfare, the discrimination might decline somewhat (‘better times are better for women in particular’). We can test this hypothesis with our historical data. In sum, the economic views on dimorphism focused on the ways in which mobility-based bargaining patterns, agricultural specialisations and other labour market factors influence the expected revenue from female labour unlike biological theories. Were the Middle Ages Good for ‘Wise Women’ and the Early Modern ‘Witch Hunting Period’ a Transition to a More Male-dominated Society? A relatively new area of study has focused on male and female heights using human bones from archaeological excavations. Koepke and Baten (2005) have employed almost 10,000 height estimates from more than 300 sites all over Europe to estimate human stature by century, region, and gender. A large amount of their study focuses on strategies of minimising measurement error; hence in this study we will not repeat those issues again, but refer the reader to Koepke and Baten’s original study. What can we learn from the archaeological study of bones about gender inequality? The most important aspect is probably the strongly changing distribution of biological welfare between the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Figure 3.1). Koepke and Baten (2005) found that the Dark Ages were really dark for women, whereas the Renaissance brought redistribution in favour of women. To be more specific, especially women in the tenth to twelfth and fourteenth centuries were particularly short in relation to men, whereas the fifteenth and sixteenthcentury women were actually quite tall. While the increase in female heights during the fifteenth century is supported by only a small sample (18 observations), the positive trend of the sixteenth century relies on 118 cases, compared with much larger samples for male heights. However, 118 cases do not constitute a large sample and we need to check whether there were obvious regional or social biases which might have made those women look relatively taller than the average European women during this period. Fortunately, most women were from the southern Rhine region in central Europe; hence they came from a European region that had average height. In terms of social selectivity, they were of similar social origin to the males of those centuries (overwhelmingly of low status, as opposed

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Figure 3.1


Male and female height from the first century to the eighteenth century

Source: Koepke and Baten 2005.

to middle or upper social status). We conclude that women had better relative anthropometric values during the Renaissance period, compared with the Middle Ages. This stands clearly in contrast to the view in much of the historical gender literature that ‘wise women’ could have had a stronger position during the Middle Ages, before the start of the ‘witch hunting period’ in the fifteenth century in order to increase male dominance. Gender Dimorphism during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries The economic historiography of relative heights mainly relies on prisoner records of female heights. The gender histories of England, Scotland and Ireland were the first studied with this type of source (Johnson and Nicholas 1995; Nicholas and Oxley 1993; Oxley 2004). A similar dataset is available for southern Germany (Baten 2000b; Baten and Murray 2000). Though doubts were raised about prisoners’ data – were they representative of the general population? – we argue that they provide some insights when approached with caution. Also, it is difficult to locate records other than prisoners’ data for studying gender differences in welfare for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using data on heights of English and Irish women and men that were transported to New South Wales, Stephen Nicholas and Deborah Oxley (1993) found that English rural women suffered the most – depicted by a decline in stature – compared to urban and rural men, and urban women during 1800–1815


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confirming the differential impact of industrialisation on English women’s living standard. Declining labour market opportunities for women was one of the reasons for the differential welfare. Interestingly, during the same period, the height of Irish women increased – along with the height of men – suggesting that pre-famine Irish living standards were better compared to the famine period. We argue that the increasing specialisation of some Irish regions in butter production for the English market could have caused this relatively positive development – after the fat had been removed, the remaining low-fat milk was a high quality food that could not be transported to urban or English consumers with high purchasing power. Hence the consumption of the low fat milk by the locals at very low cost improved their stature. This cross-sectional result of better Irish net nutrition is confirmed by Mokyr and O’Grada (1994) and can be explained by proximity effects to Irish milk (on this effect, see Baten and Murray 2000). Ireland had traditionally one of the highest cattle per capita ratios in Europe. This effect increased also the relative quality of female nutrition, as females had often more direct access to this perishable product. The ‘proximityand-equality effect’ of local low-fat milk abundance is also visible in the more favourable mortality statistics of the English west coast and northern England (Klasen et al. 2005). Johnson and Nicholas (1995) argued that both males and females born between the early 1820s and the mid-1850s in the UK suffered from nutritional stress. They found that men in England before 1850 suffered a major nutritional insult in line with the hungry forties argument and the female height decline and its timing parallels that for men. The manufacturing sector affected both male and female stature negatively whereas urban industrial living had a negative impact on the male standard of living. However, the decrease in female criminal heights in the 1820s and 1850s was greater than that for men. This reflects the differential impact of disease, work and inter-household allocation during the mid-nineteenth century crisis. According to Horrell and Oxley (1999), gender bias in the treatment of children is expected to occur in the regions where there are few opportunities for women to work, especially at low income levels. They found that greater availability of work for children of one sex is not reflected in their well-being. For example, the textile industry provided opportunities for female employment, whereas in metal manufacturing male labour dominated. In both industries, boys received more food than girls. They conclude – based on other evidence – that a child’s wellbeing is decided by the expected economic returns: both the likelihood of a child being employed and the length of time for which parents might expect to be the recipients of the earning, as evaluated by the parents. The removal of employment opportunities for girls had deleterious consequences on the welfare of females. The British studies found a height decline for both genders in the 1830s and 1840s. However, Coll and Komlos (1998) found a slightly earlier decline of female heights by comparing all the European studies. This is especially true in the study on southern Germany (Baten and Murray 2000) and using this southern

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Figure 3.2


Height dimorphism in Bavaria, 1820–1875/7

Source: Calculated from data in Baten and Murray (2000).

Germany data, we study the gender dimorphism. We took neither the ratio of male and female heights nor the absolute difference between male and female heights. We calculated gender dimorphism as the difference between the mean heights of the genders expressed as a percentage of male height, as shown in the second equation for gender dimorphism in this chapter. We found that in southern Germany, heights of men and women were less correlated compared to the British Isles. The height dimorphism was relatively high in the early period right up until the famine years of the mid-nineteenth century (Figure 3.2). However, gender dimorphism declined in the late 1850s and 1860s when the general situation improved, indicating that ‘better times are better for women’, which is quite opposed to the resiliency hypothesis. Gender Differences in the Transition Period from Socialism to Market Economy in the Twentieth Century For the early twentieth century, Bernard Harris will give a more detailed and wellinformed review than we could do here (see also Harris 1994; Harris 1998b). For the late twentieth century in contrast, anthropometric dimorphism has not yet been studied very well, partly because changing food habits could play a role in this period. However, one promising area of research is the transition period from


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socialism to market economies between the 1980s and 1990s. Even if socialist countries were unsuccessful in providing a sufficient average standard of living (and political freedom), they promoted women’s work and extended child care, which might have resulted in more gender equality. The hypothesis would be that gender inequality should have been lower in socialist countries and increased during the transition phase towards market economies. Komlos and Kriwy (2003) found that gender differences were slightly smaller in the GDR compared both with western and eastern Germany after reunification. After reunification, the heights of male children and even military conscripts in the East converged rapidly towards the higher Western level (Hermanussen 1995; Hermanussen 1997; Komlos and Kriwy 2003), although the exact dimension of the previous gap is still debated (Greil 1998). Female height appears to have converged less than male height, which may indicate that girls continued to experience disadvantages in terms of the distribution of nutritional and medical resources within eastern German households after Reunification (Komlos and Kriwy 2003). Komlos and Kriwy (2003) note that male heights in Brandenburg improved more during and after Reunification, as was the case in other areas of eastern Germany (see also Schilitz 2001; Kromeyer et al. 1997). Zellner et al. (2004) postulate that the height of 7-year-old girls in Jena was 124.5 cm in 2001, whereas boys were 126.4 cm tall (Jena is situated in the Land of Thueringen, south-west of Berlin and Brandenburg). Also, heights in Kazakhstan – one of the former Soviet republics in Central Asia – have been stagnating or declining, with the height of girls developing even worse than boys’ height due to religiously induced discrimination in the labour market (Dangour et al. 2003). Further light is shed on this unresolved puzzle by the development of mortality rates in the years following German unification. Available data suggests that mortality rates deteriorated in eastern Germany during this period, although mainly for those in the middle age groups around age 40. Eberstadt, and Riphahn and Zimmermann studied the determinants of this surprising demographic development (Eberstadt 1993; Riphahn and Zimmermann 2000). They found that certain gender-specific age groups were most at risk. In general, female mortality decreased in eastern Germany after Reunification; only women in the age group 35–45 experienced some increase in mortality between 1989 and 1991. Eastern German men in this 35–45 age group also saw an increase in mortality. In the first few years after Reunification, younger eastern German males also experienced increased mortality, but their death rates moved back to normal values relatively fast. In contrast, as late as 1994, eastern German males around age 40 still had mortality rates 10–20 per cent higher than before Reunification. One may speculate that younger people adjusted more easily to the new situation, while men of 35–45 years are typically in a life phase in which they want to apply the knowledge they have obtained up to that point. Not being able to do so and instead being faced with uncertainty and often unemployment, it seems likely that they experienced strong psycho-social stress. Riphahn and Zimmermann conclude that the increased mortality rates among eastern German

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men of this age group were mostly caused by over-consumption of alcohol and by circulatory and cardio-vascular problems which were also related to psycho-social stress (Riphahn and Zimmermann 2000). It is interesting that women were much less sensitive to this development, even though they were the main victims of the high unemployment which emerged in eastern Germany after Reunification. Only middle-aged women in eastern Germany saw some increase in their mortality rates after Reunification. For eastern German women as a whole, in contrast, life expectancy improved considerably, mostly because of falling mortality risks for elderly women and, to a lesser extent, for very young females. We interviewed a small sample of eastern German individuals after Reunification who suggested that men suffered more than women from the psycho-social stress of unemployment, because – in accordance with traditional gender roles – males felt more loss in social status from losing their jobs. For the period after 1994, Baten and Boehm (2008) argued also for the Land of Brandenburg (eastern Germany) that boys of age six were taller than girls, which is not normally the case in the age range between birth and the teenage growth spurt. In fact, none of the available growth reference charts for the US and European countries suggest a height advantage for boys of this age (see http://www.cdc. gov/growthcharts/). For the late twentieth century, there are also some studies on less developed countries and middle income countries. Conducting a worldwide comparison, Guntupalli and Schwekendiek (2006) investigate male and female malnutrition rates of children living in 117 countries at the end of the millennium (1995–2001). They found that a reduction of fertility rates and improvement in GDP lowers the malnutrition rates significantly for both male and female children. The Asian continent showed the highest female discrimination compared to the rest of the world. Measuring Gender Differences in Well-Being: Discussion In all populations, mean male stature is greater than female stature. However, the interesting parameter is the size of stature differences between different populations – especially over time. We would argue that gender differences in stature can be used to answer some important questions: which societies discriminate against females more than others? What effect does relative female labour participation have? Does the dimorphism increase or decrease during famine and crisis periods? However, the current available anthropometric data is not sufficient to answer these questions in a systematic way. More countries need to be documented, for example for the nineteenth and perhaps early twentieth centuries: all of eastern, southern, and northern Europe is missing from our database, and within central Europe only Bavarian data is available. For western Europe, the situation is somewhat better with existing studies on England, Scotland and Ireland, and


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research on the Netherlands and Switzerland is currently proceeding. However, even within western Europe, France and Belgium are clearly missing. It is likely that prison records of female and male convicts have survived as they did in other countries. Even for countries such as Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, prison records have survived in the archives; hence we can expect the same from the ‘white spot on the map’ countries in Europe mentioned above. References Baten, J. (2000a), ‘Height and real wages: an international comparison’, Jahrbuch Fuer Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 11, 17–32. Baten, J. (2000b), ‘Economic development and the distribution of nutritional resources in Bavaria, 1797–1839’, Journal of Income Distribution, 9, 89–106. Baten, J. and Boehm, A. (2008), ‘Trends of children’s height and parental unemployment: a large-scale anthropometric study on eastern Germany, 1994– 2006’, CESifo Working Paper. Baten, J. and Murray, J. (2000), ‘Heights of men and women in 19th-century Bavaria: economic, nutritional, and disease influences’, Explorations in Economic History, 37, 351–69. Boix, C. and Rosenbluth, F. (2004), ‘Bones of contention: the political economy of height inequality’, Working Paper Yale/Chicago. Brace, C.L., Shao X-q and Zhang Z-b (1984), ‘Prehistoric and modern tooth size in China’, in F.H. Smith, and F. Spencer, eds, The Origins of Modern Humans: A World Survey of the Fossil Evidence, New York: Liss, 485–516. Brauer, G.W. (1982), ‘Size sexual dimorphism and secular trend: indicators of subclinical malnutrition’, in R.L. Hall, ed., Sexual Dimorphism in Homo Sapiens: A Question of Size, New York: Prager, 245–59. Clutton-Brock, T.H. and Harvey, P.H. (1984), ‘Comparative approaches to investigating adaptation’, in J.R. Krebs and N.B. Davies, eds, Behavioral Ecology. An Evolutionary Approach, 7–29. Coll, S. and Komlos, J. (1998), ‘The biological standard of living and economic development: nutrition, health and well-being in historical perspective’, in C.E. Nunez, ed., Debates and Controversies in Economic History. Proceedings of the Twelfth International Economic History Congress, Madrid, 219–82. Dangour, A.D., Farmer, A., Hill, H.L. and Ismail, S.J. (2003), ‘Anthropometric status of Kazakh children in the 1990s’, Economics and Human Biology, 1, 43–53. Das Gupta, P. (1993), An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dyson, T. and Moore, M. (1983), ‘On kinship structure, female autonomy, and demographic behavior in India’, Population and Development Review, 9(1), 35–60.

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Eberstadt, N. (1993), ‘Mortality and the fate of communist states’, Communist Economies and Economic Transformation, 5, 499–517. Eveleth, P.B. and Tanner, J.M. (1976), Worldwide Variations in Human Growth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Floud, R. and Harris, B. (1997), ‘Health, height, and welfare: Britain 1700–1980’, in R.H. Steckel and R. Floud, eds, Health and Welfare during Industrialization, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 91–126. Fogel, R.W. et al. (1983), ‘Secular changes in American and British stature and nutrition’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 14(2), 445–81. Frayer, D.W. (1984), ‘Biological and cultural change in the European Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene’, in F.H. Smith and F. Spencer, eds, The Origins of Modern Humans: A World Survey of the Fossil Evidence, New York: Liss, 211–50. Frayer, D.W. and Wolpoff, M.H. (1985), ‘Sexual dimorphism’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 14, 429–73. Gaulin, S.J.C. and Boster, J.S. (1985), ‘Cross cultural differences in sexual dimorphism: is there any variance to be explained?’, Ethology and Sociobiology, 6,193–99. Gray, J.P. and Wolfe, L.D. (1980), ‘Height and sexual dimorphism of stature among societies’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 53, 441–56. Gray, J.P. and Wolfe, L.D. (1982), A cross-cultural investigation into the sexual dimorphism of stature, in R.L. Hall, ed., Sexual Dimorphism in Homo Sapiens: A Question of Size, New York: Praeger Scientific, 197–230. Greil, H. (1998), Age- and sex-specificity of the secular trend of height in eastern Germany, in J. Komlos and J. Baten, eds, The Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 483–96. Guntupalli, A.M. (2007), Anthropometric evidence of gender inequality in India, PhD thesis, University of Tuebingen. Guntupalli, A.M. and Schwekendiek, D. (2006), ‘A worldwide study on the gender differences in the welfare of children’, Tuebingen, Working Paper. Gustafsson, A. and Lindenfors, P. (2004), ‘Human size evolution: No allometric relationship between male and female stature’, Journal of Human Evolution, 47, 253–66. Hamilton, M.E. (1982), Sexual dimorphism in skeletal samples, in R.L. Hall, ed., Sexual Dimorphism in Homo Sapiens: A Question of Size, New York: Prager, 107–63. Harris, B. (1994), ‘Health, height, and history: an overview of recent developments in anthropometric history’, Social History of Medicine, 7, 297–320. Harris, B. (1998a), ‘Gender, height and mortality in England and Wales in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, in J. Komlos and J. Baten, eds, The Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 413–48.


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Harris, B. (1998b), ‘The height of schoolchildren in Britain, 1900–1950’, in J. Komlos, ed., Stature, Living Standards, and Economic Development. Essays in Anthropometric History, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 25–38. Hermanussen, M. (1995), ‘Die Körpergröße Deutscher Wehrpflichtiger vor und nach der Deutschen Wiedervereinigung’, Die Medizinische Welt, 46, 391–92. Hermanussen, M. (1997), ‘Catch-up in final height after unification of Germany’, Acta Med Auxology, 29(3), 135–41. Holden, C. and Mace, R. (1999), ‘Sexual dimorphism in stature and women’s work: a phylogenetic cross-cultural analysis’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 110, 27–45. Horrell, Sara; Humpries, Jane and Voth Hans-Joachim (1998), ‘Stature and relative deprivation: fatherless children in early industrial Britain’, Continuity and Change, 13(1), 73–115. Horrell, S. and Oxley, D. (1999), ‘Crust or crumb? Intrahousehold resource allocation and male breadwinning’, Economic History Review, 52, 494–522. Johnson, P and Nicholas, S. (1995), ‘Male and female living standards in England and Wales, 1812–1857: Evidence from criminal height records’, Economic History Review, 48(3), 470–81. Kennedy, KAR. (1984), ‘Biological adaptation and affinities of mesolithic South Asians’, in J. Lukacs, eds, People of South Asia, New York: Plenum, 29–58. Klasen, S. (1998), ‘Marriage, bargaining, and intrahousehold resource allocation: excess female mortality among adults during early German development (1740–1860)’, Journal of Economic History, 58, 432–67. Klasen, S., Humphries, J. and McNay, K. (2005), ‘Excess female mortality in 19th century England and Wales: a regional analysis’, Social Science History, 29(4), 687–88. Koepke, N. and Baten, J. (2005), ‘The biological standard of living in Europe during the last two millennia’, European Review of Economic History, 9(1), 61–95. Komlos, J. (1985), ‘Stature and nutrition in the Habsburg monarchy: the standard of living and economic development’, American Historical Review, 90, 1149– 61. Komlos, J. and Kriwy, P. (2003), ‘The biological standard of living in the two Germanies’, German Economic Review, 4(4), 493–507. Kromeyer, K., Hauspie, R.C. and Susanne, C. (1997), ‘Socioeconomic factors and growth during childhood and adolescence in Jena children’, Annals of Human Biology, 24(4), 343–53. Lieberman, L.S. (1982), ‘Normal and abnormal sexual dimorphic patterns of growth and development’, in R.L. Hall, ed., Sexual Dimorphism in Homo Sapiens: A Question of Size, New York: Prager, 263–316. Mokyr, J. and O’Grada, C. (1994), ‘The heights of the British and the Irish c. 1800–1815’, in J. Komlos, ed., Stature, Living Standards, and Economic Development: Essays in Anthropometric History, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 39–59.

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Moradi, A. and Guntupalli, A.M. (forthcoming), ‘What does gender dimorphism in stature tell us about discrimination in rural India, 1930–1975?’, in R. Bharati et al., eds, Gender Issues in the World, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nicholas, S. and Oxley, D. (1993), ‘The living standards of women during the industrial revolution, 1795–1820’, Economic History Review, 46, 723–49. Nickens, P.R. (1976), ‘Stature reduction as an adaptive response to food production in Mesoamerica’, Journal of Archaeological Science, 3, 31–41. Ogilvie, S. (2004), ‘How does social capital affect women? Guilds and communities in early modern Germany’, American Historical Review, 109, 325–59. Oxley, D. (2004), ‘Living standards of women in prefamine Ireland’, Social Science History, 28(2), 271–96. Riphahn, R.T. and Zimmermann, K.F. (2000), ‘The mortality crisis in eastern Germany’, in G.A. Cornea, and R. Paniccià, eds, The Mortality Crisis in Transitional Economies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 227–52. Schilitz, A. (2001), Körperliche Entwicklung und Körperzusammensetzung von Brandenburger Schulkindern im Geschlechter-und Altersgruppenvergleich, Aachen: Shaker Verlag. Steckel, R.H. (1995), ‘Stature and the standard of living’, Journal of Economic Literature, 33(4), 1903–40. Steckel, R.H. and Floud, R. (1997), Health and Welfare during Industrialization, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Stini, W.A. (1985), ‘Growth rates and sexual dimorphism in evolutionary perspectives’, in R.I. Gilbert and J.H. Mielke, eds, The Analysis of Prehistoric Diets, Orlando: Academic Press, 191–226. Tanner, J.M. (1978), Foetus into Man: Physical Growth from Conception to Maturity, London: Open Books. WHO Working Group (1986), ‘Use and interpretation of anthropometric indicators of nutritional status’, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 64(6), 929–41. Wolanski, N. and Kasprzak, E. (1976), ‘Stature as measure of environmental change’, Currrent Anthropology, 17, 548–52. Zellner, K., Jaeger, U. and Kromeyer-Hauschild, K. (2004), ‘Height, weight and BMI of schoolchildren in Jena, Germany – are secular changes levelling off?’ Economics and Human Biology, 2(2), 281–94.

Chapter 4

Anthropometric History, Gender and the Measurement of Well-Being Bernard Harris

As the previous chapter has also demonstrated, economic and social historians have often used height and other anthropometric indicators to investigate the well-being of earlier generations. Although much of this research has focused specifically on the heights and weights of men, there is also a growing body of evidence relating to women and to children of both sexes, and this work has enabled anthropometric historians to pay increasing attention to the distribution of resources within households and to the question of gender. This chapter draws on this material to examine some of the main changes in the well-being of males and females in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Height, Weight and the Standard of Living As the introduction to this book has already demonstrated, the concept of the standard of living has a long and contested history. During the first half of the twentieth century, social investigators such as Seebohm Rowntree, Arthur Bowley and Herbert Tout attempted to measure the standard of living of different populations by looking at wage levels and household incomes and comparing them with the cost of purchasing the items necessary to satisfy an agreed set of ‘basic needs’. However, this approach has been strongly criticised by feminists (and others) on a variety of grounds. These have included the failure to take account of the contribution made by women (especially) to the maintenance of household well-being or to take account of inequalities in the distribution of resources within the household. Writers such as Amartya Sen (1987: 1) have also argued that this kind of approach to the measurement of well-being is excessively reductionist, because ‘the idea [of the standard of living] is full of contrasts, conflicts and contradictions’. Many of the issues which have surfaced in debates about the measurement of living standards among present-day populations have also been reflected in debates about the well-being of historical populations. Sheila Ryan Johansson (1977) opened up a rich seam of work when she drew attention to the importance of inequalities in the distribution of resources within the household during Britain’s industrial revolution, and Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries (1992: 850) have

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pointed out that even though the majority of authors have attempted to measure changes in welfare by looking at adult male wage rates, ‘the standard of living is determined by the household’s access to all resources – including the contributions of other family members and welfare subsidies’. Historians have also used the example of the industrial revolution to draw attention to the broader dimensions of well-being. The socialist historian, J.L. Hammond (1930: 225), argued that even if real wages had increased, these benefits may well have been outweighed by ‘the ugliness of the new life, with its growing slums, its lack of beautiful buildings, its destruction of nature and its disregard of man’s [sic.] deeper needs’. The use of anthropometric data, such as height, weight and body mass index (BMI), offers one potential solution to the questions which this debate raises. As we have already seen, one of the principal objections to the use of more traditional indicators, such as real wage rates, is that they reveal relatively little about the way in which resources are used or the way in which they are distributed within the household, whereas variations in height and weight can tell us something about the distribution of resources, both between adults and children and, in certain cases, between children of different sexes. In addition, differences in the average weight of different sections of the population also have the potential to shed new light on inequalities in the distribution of resources between men and women (see, e.g., Horrell, Meredith and Oxley 2006). However, because height is a measure of net nutritional status, it also has the potential to capture the impact of some of the broader aspects of welfare, such as changes in work intensity or environmental conditions. As Roderick Floud (1984: 19–20) argued: the advantage of height over other measures of welfare is … that height measures already include the effects of environmental or exogenous influences on welfare which are not included within conventional measures of income. Thus there is no need to impute for such influences in the manner of Usher (1980) or Williamson (1984).

In 1987, John Komlos introduced an important new dimension to arguments about the relationship between height and the standard of living when he compared changes in the average heights of United States army cadets at the West Point Military Academy with changes in per capita income. He argued that the two measures of welfare moved in opposite directions and that height was ‘a component of the biological standard of living’ (1987: 921). However, the concept of the ‘biological standard of living’ has not been accepted uncritically (Floud, Wachter and Gregory 1993a: 146; 1993b: 367). It implies that there is more than one ‘standard of living’, even though one of the key claims made by anthropometric historians is that height provides a more complete measure of living standards than that provided by wages alone. For this reason, it may be preferable to regard height as ‘a biological measure of the standard of living’ rather than a measure of ‘the biological standard of living’.

Anthropometric History, Gender and the Measurement of Well-Being

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Although this chapter is primarily concerned with the relationship between height and living standards, it is important to recognise that anthropometric historians have also used height, and other anthropometric indicators, to address a wide range of other questions. Some of the earliest work in this field was designed to address questions raised by the medical writer, Thomas McKeown, about the relationship between improvements in nutrition and the decline of mortality (Fogel et al. 1978), and subsequent work has focused on the relationship between changes in height and weight, and the morbidity and mortality of successive generations (Fogel 1986; 1994). An increasing amount of attention has also been devoted to the relationship between height, weight and economic growth (Arora 2001; 2005). The Measurement of Nutritional Status Although anthropometric historians have conceptualised the relationship between height and the standard of living in different ways, they agree on the basic principle that the average height and weight of a population during its growing years reflects the impact of economic, social and environmental conditions on its biological well-being. This insight is founded on the results of many years of research in the field of human auxology. As Eveleth and Tanner (1976: 1) observed: A child’s growth rate reflects, better than any other single index, his [or her] state of health and nutrition and often, indeed, his [or her] psychological situation also. Similarly, the average value of children’s heights and weights reflects accurately the state of a nation’s public health and the average nutritional status of its citizens, when appropriate allowance is made for differences, if any, in genetic potential. This is especially so in developing or disintegrating countries … Indeed, as infant mortality goes down in a country’s development, so the importance of monitoring growth rate increases.

It is important to emphasise that height is a measure of net nutritional status – in other words, it measures the net impact of both environmental and nutritional (or dietary) conditions. The two most important determinants of average height are diet and disease. Children who are undernourished tend to be smaller than children who are well-nourished, and children who grow up in a disease-ridden environment tend to be smaller than children who develop in a more disease-free environment. However, it is often difficult to distinguish the effects of malnutrition or undernutrition from those of infection. This is partly because those parts of the world where children are most susceptible to malnutrition are also those with the highest disease rates, but also because the effects of malnutrition and disease are mutually reinforcing. To quote Eveleth and Tanner (1976: 246) again: ‘An ill child is a poorly-nourished child, although the extent of slowdown depends on a number of factors. Poorly-nourished children are more susceptible to more

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severely affected by infection than well-nourished children … Infection in turn lowers the nutritional intake of the child and the vicious spiral continues.’ The effects of nutritional deprivation and environmental stresses may vary according to age and sex. Malnutrition during the third trimester of pregnancy can lead to low birth-weight and malnutrition after birth affects growth throughout childhood (Stein et al. 1975: 22–6; Tanner 1962: 121). Although children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of nutritional and environmental ‘insults’ during the periods in their lives when they should be growing most rapidly, the effects of these conditions can also be observed at other ages (Eveleth and Tanner 1976: 241–5; 1990: 194–8; Van Wieringen 1979; 1986). Children who are consistently malnourished or subject to repeated bouts of infection grow more slowly than other children, and they reach adolescence at a later age. Such children are also likely to continue to grow for longer, but they still tend to be shorter than more favoured groups (Tanner 1962: 149). Although height remains the most important single anthropometric indicator, there are also a number of other anthropometric measures which can shed light on a population’s well-being. As we have already seen, changes in economic and social circumstances affect both height and rate of growth, and a number of writers have taken advantage of this to study changes in children’s peak-height-velocity and (in the case of girls) age-at-menarche (see, e.g., Hauspie et al. 1997). Considerable attention has also been paid to changes in weight and in the relationship between weight and height, commonly expressed in terms of the body mass index. Although weight is a much more ambiguous measure of welfare than height, it can be used to measure changes in the health and well-being of adult populations, once growth in height has ceased (Floud 1998). Sources for Comparing Male and Female Heights As we have already seen, most of the data which have been used to investigate the heights and weights of past generations have been obtained from military records and are confined to adult male populations. However, there is a significant amount of information which can also be used to shed light on the health of female populations, and to examine the specific relationship between gender and well-being. Although Floud and Wachter (1982) and Floud, Wachter and Gregory (1990) collected data on the heights of boys recruited by the Marine Society in London from the late eighteenth century, there are no directly comparable data for girls at this time. At the beginning of the 1830s, the Belgian statistician, Adolphe Quetelet, collected data on the heights and weights of various groups of boys and girls, and published the results in 1842. However, as Tanner (1981: 130) has pointed out, ‘there For two illustrations of this, see the graphs showing changes in the heights of children measured at different ages in Stuttgart between 1911 and 1953, and in Oslo between 1920 and 1980, in Tanner (1989: 130, 158).


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is something very odd, indeed almost unique’ about the data. One would normally expect to find that both boys and girls experienced an increase in their rates of growth during adolescence, and, since girls reach adolescence sooner than boys, one would also expect to find that the heights of girls exceeded those of boys at certain ages. However, Quetelet’s girls failed to show any significant evidence of an adolescent growth spurt and they were shorter than their male counterparts at all ages. If the data, which were obtained from a variety of sources, including both schools and orphanages, are discounted, the first reliable information about the heights and weights of children of both sexes is probably the evidence obtained from two factory surveys which were conducted in north-west England in 1833 and 1837. Although these children were still extremely small by modern standards, they nevertheless displayed the same patterns of growth which one would expect to find in modern populations. The girls experienced their adolescent growth spurt between the ages of eleven and fourteen, the boys achieved their peak-heightvelocities between the age of thirteen and fifteen, and the girls’ heights exceeded the boys’ heights between the ages of eleven and fifteen (Tanner 1981: 148, 155). Although other authors also collected data on the heights and weights of orphans and factory children in the nineteenth century (Burgmeijer and Van Wieringen 1998: 246; Tanner 1981: 172–7), it was not until the very end of the nineteenth century that large amounts of information about the heights and weights of ‘ordinary’ children began to become available. During the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a growing demand for the introduction of school medical inspections, and an increasing number of children were weighed and measured as part of their routine health checks (Harris 1995: 27–32). In the majority of cases, it seems likely that these details were entered on the children’s record cards and then forgotten, but some school medical officers published periodic tables, showing the average heights and weights of the children in their areas. These statistics will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter. Despite the wealth of information which has been collected about the heights of adult men, much less is known about the heights of past generations of women, and most of what we do know is derived from the measurements of female convicts and prisoners (Nicholas and Oxley 1993; Johnson and Nicholas 1995; 1997; Riggs 1994; Baten and Murray 1997; 2000). On the face of it, it should be possible to compare the heights of male and female prisoners, if they are drawn from comparable populations. However, this assumption has not always been accepted and we will return to it. As we have already seen, most of the information about adult male heights has been obtained from military records, which rarely include information about female recruits, at least before the end of the nineteenth century. However, substantial numbers of women were recruited by European armies during both World Wars and the data may be used to shed new light on the well-being of female populations in the future. In the United Kingdom, the National Archives hold data on 556 Officers of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, approximately 30,000 airwomen, and approximately 7,000 members of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (out of

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50,000 women who joined the corps between 1914 and 1918), and an increasing proportion of these records are now being made available electronically. Some Methodological Issues One of the main methodological problems associated with the analysis of height data is the problem of comparing the heights of people of different ages and sexes. We have already seen that girls are usually shorter than boys in early- to middlechildhood and reach adolescence at younger ages. This is particularly important in relation to school populations, in which the oldest children were often measured at ages at which girls had already reached adolescence, whilst large number of boys had yet to do so. In earlier work (Harris 1988; 1989; 1994; 1998), I attempted to address this issue in the case of British children by comparing the average heights of boys and girls in the past with the distributions of boys’ and girls’ heights in London in 1965. However, in 1995 Richard Steckel published a new set of height standards based on figures compiled by the United States National Center for Health Statistics in 1977 and these standards have since been accepted for use in historical analysis by other workers in the field (see, e.g., López-Alonso 2000; Komlos 2003: 40). Although it seems reasonable to compare the heights of past generations of boys and girls with those of more recent children, this approach incorporates two important assumptions. In the first place, it assumes that the same standards can be applied to all populations, and takes little account of any potential differences in what Eveleth and Tanner (1976: 1) called ‘genetic potential’. However, a number of studies have shown that international differences in height owe far more to social, economic and environmental variations than to differences in ‘race’ or ethnicity (Steckel 1983; Schmitt and Harrison 1988). Eveleth and Tanner (1990: 179–90) suggested that some differences persisted even when people from different ethnic backgrounds were brought up under comparable circumstances, but the differences were not great, and they did not suggest that there were any significant ‘ethnic’ differences between populations of European origin. The second key assumption, which is particularly relevant to the subject of his paper, is that differences between the heights and rates of growth of males and females in the standard population are not themselves the consequence of persistent patterns of gender discrimination. One might argue that this assumption is ultimately untestable under ‘natural’ conditions, but it seems unlikely that gender discrimination exercised a greater influence on the heights and weights of The records of the WRNS can be found in ADM318; airwomen’s records are in AIR80; and those of the WAAC are in WO398. The WAAC records are now available online (see http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documentsonline/ last accessed 24 March 2009). I am grateful to Roderick Floud for recommending this strategy to me.


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US children in 1977 than on the heights of European children in the more distant past (see also Harris 1998: 428). Another important problem, from the point of view of gender-based comparisons, concerns the existence, or otherwise, of physiological differences in the reactions of males and females to adverse circumstances. According to James Tanner (1962: 127), ‘girls … are less easily thrown off their growth curves … than boys’ and McCance argued that ‘males are more vulnerable [to undernutrition] … and rehabilitate less completely’ (see Thomson et al. 1967). These arguments are reinforced by evidence which suggests that the average heights of males increased more rapidly than those of females over the course of the twentieth century, although this may not necessarily have been true in all countries (see Silventoinen et al. 2000; Silventoinen 2003: 274–5). However, some economic historians believe that there is also evidence to suggest that ‘females began to experience nutritional stress earlier than males during a[n economic] downturn and were less likely to show improvement in an upswing’ (Komlos 1994: 217). If these arguments are correct, one implication would be that females experienced even greater hardship during periods of economic difficulty, despite possessing greater powers of resistance. Although this chapter uses the NCHS standards, it is important to recognise that these do not necessarily represent the standards attained by an optimally-nourished population. There is now increasing evidence to suggest that the average heights of children in many parts of the world have continued to increase since the 1970s and the heights attained by many European populations are now significantly greater than those attained in the United States (Komlos and Baur 2004: 59). As a result, it may well become necessary to identify a different ‘standard population’ in the future. Anthropometric Indicators of Children’s Well-Being In a previous article, I examined differences in the heights of boys and girls in different parts of the United Kingdom before the First World War. When the data were compared with the heights of children in London in 1965, it appeared that past generations of girls were taller, in comparison with their modern counterparts, than past generations of boys. These findings appeared to reinforce Tanner’s view that girls were more resistant to adverse conditions and that there was more scope for the heights of boys to increase as conditions improved (Harris 1998: 425–8). It is now possible to extend this analysis using data from a variety of other European countries. The original data were obtained from a number of sources, including Bodzsár and Susanne’s edited collection on Secular Growth Changes in Europe (1998). This volume provides the most comprehensive published survey There has, however, been little change in the average heights of US children since 1977. See Kuczmarski, R.J., Ogden, C.L., Guo, S.S. et al. 2002: 11, 124.

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Table 4.1 Average heights of children in different European countries, 1865–1940 Year of measurement Germany (Jena)

Greece (Athens)

Hungary Italy Netherlands Norway (Oslo)

Sweden

1880 1921 1932 1920 1928 1931 1910–20

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